|
|
| HomeTownValue.com, Your Home Town 'Past and Present' |
|
BusinessesExploring our Heritage through our Ancestors
State Parks and Camping in MichiganLocal HistoryIt was to this settling of Chicago residents that started escaping in the early 1900s. As they arrived they found a village that was already entering a second life. Saugatuck, and a sister community called Singapore down the Kalamazoo River, were settled in the mid-1800s by lumber interests. For many decades they supported a thriving mix of sawmills, planning mills, shingle mills, barrel factories and other wood product firms. Saugatuck contributed much of the lumber used to rebuild Chicago after the Great Fire of 1871. When the trees were gone, however, so were lumber men. Several mills were actually loaded aboard Great Lakes schooners to be transported elsewhere. The death of trees resulted in a particularly harsh fate for Saugatuck's downriver neighbor. Without their presence as a windbreak, blowing sand gradually buried the village and today it lives on only in stories as the "Lost City of Singapore." Saugatuck, however, survived. The resort trade that started to emerge at the turn of the century took a propitious turn in 1910 when a group of Chicago artists established the Summer School of Painting on Ox-Bow Lagoon in Saugatuck. Information courtesy of the Saugatuck Visitor's Bureau.
|
|
|
Send mail to HomeTownValue.com with questions or comments about this web site.
Copyright 2001- 2008, HomeTownValue.com, J. Stover |
