Cover artwork is an AI-generated editorial illustration for History Loves Company.
What could you buy with a five-dollar bill from Singapore, Michigan? Take it to the lumber company’s store and it helped pay for supplies. Take it farther down the road and you had to find somebody willing to trust a bank on the Kalamazoo River.
In an 1880 history of the area, a man named Stephen D. Nichols recalled how little use Singapore money was away from home. Nichols had put land behind the bank himself. Mill workers had a more immediate stake in the arrangement. The company paid them in banknotes, and its store accepted those notes back. Long before the dunes covered Singapore, the people working there understood exactly where their town’s influence ended. Read the 1880 account under “Singapore.”See the surviving five-dollar note design.
What the map promised
Look at the 1873 map of Singapore alongside the waterfront photograph from 1869. The map divides the ground into orderly blocks. The photograph gives you something the surveyor’s lines can’t tell you. A sawmill was already standing there. The History Center pairs the two because the land investors laid out a much larger town than the one people actually built. Compare the map and the mill photograph.
The location explains why anyone took the gamble. On the north side of the Kalamazoo River, close to its mouth, a mill had access to white pine and a route out to Lake Michigan. Schooners could carry the finished lumber to Chicago. Oshea Wilder and his sons bought land in the township in 1837. Workers arrived, the mill opened, and the company built housing and a store. Alongside nearby places that existed mainly in land salesmen’s plans, Singapore had a payroll. Read the township history.
The mill left by water
By the 1870s, the supply of nearby white pine had dwindled. Machinery could go where the timber was. In 1875, the principal sawmill came apart and its equipment went north to St. Ignace. Think about what moved with it. A blade and an engine could resume work somewhere else. The riverside store needed people drawing wages within walking distance. Read the History Center’s mill chronology.
Michigan’s historical marker gives the order of events. Timber ran short, mills closed, and residents left, many for nearby Saugatuck. Then drifting sand gradually covered the site. Cutting the trees had done two things at once. It had used up the material that kept the mills running and stripped shelter from a settlement on a windy stretch of the lakeshore. Read Michigan’s Singapore marker.See the local account of the shifting sand.
One building went upriver
The bank failed in 1842, decades before the last mill packed up. Its building had a longer life. It was moved upriver, and the Saugatuck-Douglas History Center identifies it at 317 Butler Street in Saugatuck. The next time you picture a town disappearing under sand, leave room in that picture for a bank building traveling in the opposite direction. Find the bank in the History Center’s guide.
Do you know a Michigan town that lost its mill, station or waterfront but still has a building from those days? Tell us its name and what survived in the comments on the film.
