Singapore, Michigan's Buried Ghost Town

Oshea Wilder, a New York land speculator, wanted a Lake Michigan port that could rival Chicago and Milwaukee, and he founded Singapore near the mouth of the Kalamazoo River to get one. Sources disagree on the year: Wikipedia says Wilder founded it in 1836, while the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center says Eastern investors founded the lumber-mill town in 1837. The story goes that he named it after the booming Asian port visited by Yankee captains in their clipper ships, to attract ship trade.

At its peak in the mid-1800s, Singapore was a lumber port town of roughly 200 residents with two hotels and several general stores. Accounts differ on its mills: most say three sawmills, one counts four mills, and one lists three mills plus two sawmills among 23 buildings. It even housed what is sometimes credited as Michigan’s first schoolroom, an old circular saw serving as the school bell. One of Michigan’s earliest three-masted schooner ships, the Octavia, was built at Singapore to carry lumber downlake to Chicago.

The town’s fate became entangled with one of the most famous disasters in American history. The Great Fires of 1871 devastated Chicago, Holland, Peshtigo, and Manistee, creating an urgent demand for lumber across the Midwest. Singapore’s mills answered by cutting nearly every tree around the town, leaving the dunes bare.

The ecological consequences were swift. Without roots to anchor the sand, relentless westerly winds off Lake Michigan began driving the dunes inland at an estimated rate of ten feet per year. The very forces that had made Singapore prosperous, the lake, the wind, the sand, turned on it. By the mid-1870s residents had largely fled to nearby Saugatuck; the town was abandoned by 1875. Its principal mill was dismantled and shipped north to St. Ignace, where pine forests still stood.

As the dunes advanced, a local legend took hold that persists: one stubborn resident refused to leave even as the sand climbed his house, moving from floor to floor as each level filled, until he only finally departed when the dunes reached the roof. This story is often compared to the “cow kicking over the lantern” tale of the Great Chicago Fire, a colorful legend born of disaster.

By the early 1900s the advancing dunes had swallowed almost all of Singapore beneath layers of sand. Yet the buried structures were not entirely invisible: as late as the 1970s the roof of a three-story hotel could still be seen from the highest dune peaks. Building materials, tools, and household goods have occasionally surfaced as the dunes shift, but no major archaeological excavation has ever been conducted at the site.

Some original buildings were saved. The Jenkins-Mulder Singapore House, transported across the frozen lake in the 1870s, stands at 333 Lucy Street in nearby Saugatuck. A Michigan Historical Marker at Saugatuck Village Hall commemorates the lost town, and the Singapore Yacht Club carries its name.