Singapore02.JPG

Lumber town: Sawmills crowd Singapore's Kalamazoo River waterfront, shown here in 1869 with the schooner O.R. Johnson in port. After the Great Chicago Fire in 1871, Singapore supplied much of the wood used to rebuild the city.

(Courtesy Photo)

SAUGATUCK — It’s a fairly common thing for Travis and Sandra Randolph to field questions from curious tourists and historians about their home in Saugatuck, and its origins in what many consider to be the state’s most famous ghost town.

According to family lore, the two-story wing of his house at 996 Holland St. was slid down the frozen Kalamazoo River on wooden logs in the mid-1870s from its original location in Singapore, where Randolph’s great-grandfather worked in a sawmill.

Today, the Randolph house represents one of the last vestiges of a once-thriving company town that supplied much of the timber that rebuilt Chicago after the great fire in 1871.

The town sat near the mouth of the river before its buildings were mostly dismantled, deserted and eventually buried by the shifting sand dunes north of Saugatuck.

“The fact that we can trace our family to Singapore through the move is very interesting,” said Randolph, whose grandmother, Nella Van Leeuwen, was the first of her family to be born after the house was moved in 1876.

But the story of Singapore itself, well, “it’s more mythology these days than anything else,” he said.

The tale that captures people’s imagination is really an idea of something that doesn’t exist in a practical sense. But dune ride guides and a historical maker at Saugatuck City Hall keep the legend alive.

The historical marker tells of a bustling waterfront, with busy sawmills, hotels, general stores and a wildcat bank that outshone The Flats to the south, as Saugatuck was known then. When the timber was depleted, the people drifted away and nature reclaimed the site.

There was once great hope and promise of Singapore becoming one of the grand cities of the west, and much of what was there is verifiable, according to local historian Kit Lane. But nowadays, it’s uncertain how much of the town exists under the sand.

Singapore was established in 1836 by New York speculator Oshea Wilder and the first mill there was cutting more than 300,000 board feet of lumber a month by the summer of 1839. It was mostly a rough kind of work town, according to Lane’s research.

In 1850, Francis Stockbridge, later a U.S. Senator who helped build the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, bought one of the sawmills in Singapore.

He and lumber baron Otis Johnson greatly benefitted from the 1871 fires that destroyed Chicago and Holland, but the demand for timber soon depleted the Allegan County forests. Singapore’s main mill was moved to St. Ignace in 1875.

That spelled the end for a town that had boasted a population of several hundred. Most of the buildings were moved or dismantled. Perhaps ten buildings were relocated to Saugtauck, including the Singapore Bank Building on Butler Street that houses a bookstore and gallery, and several other houses.

In Lane’s book, “Buried Singapore: Michigan’s Imaginary Pompeii,” a woman who visited in 1883 from Iowa wrote that about a dozen or so houses, a hotel and part of a mill remained “partially buried in sand and in good shape. Not a person lives there.”

Stripped of timber and blown by a near-constant west wind off the lake, the dune between Singapore and the lake enveloped the town’s streets and buried all but the tallest structure. Eventually, that too, was hidden.

A new river channel was built in 1906. Nearby cottages, half-covered in sand into the 1930s, later helped give rise to the story of a buried town.

Lane said a large, oddly shaped dune west of the area where developer Aubrey McClendon proposes building a resort, is the likely location of that last large structure.

“One would presume that if you were to dig into that dune, you might find the proof there was civilization there at one time,” Lane said.

McClendon’s people have no such inclination.

Attorney James Bruinsma said “we don’t ever plan to touch that area.”

The closest anyone can legally get to Singapore these days is to wander past one of the buildings in Saugatuck or take a boat ride on the river. The land is all private property.

Randolph, who used to cross-country ski atop old Singapore when the property was owned by the Denison family, said seawall improvements removed the last pieces of Singapore’s old mill visible at the river bank.

But, like any good ghost story, bits and pieces keep the legend alive. He speculated a planned restoration of his home could turn up an artifact in the future. And a friend recently showed him an old brick found on the site, believed to be part of Singapore.

“There’s still some available out there... somewhere.”

E-mail the author of this story: localnews@grpress.com