THE LOST TOWN OF SINGAPORE MICHIGAN-A CAUTIONARY TALE OF ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION

 

Founded in 1836 and home of Michigan's first schoolhouse, Singapore was built by a land speculator who hoped that he could created a port city to rival Chicago and Milwaukee. It was located on the Lake Michigan shoreline near present day Saugatuck at the mouth of the Kalamazoo river. After fires swept through Chicago, Holland, Peshtigo and Manistee in late 1871, the area around Singapore was almost completely deforested supplying lumber for rebuilding. Without the protective tree cover, the winds and sands coming off Lake Michigan quickly eroded the town into ruins and within four years had completely covered it. The town was finally vacated by 1875 although a legend has persisted about one man who refused to leave his home. He entered and left his house via a second story window and stayed until the sand reached the roof.

C's poem about Singapore

An elegy for Singapore, Michigan

A city built on sand and metaphors,
as Petersburg was raised upon a swamp.

Your founding czar came also from the east:
Oshea Wilder tried to live his name.

Reaching peninsula, he called it island,
a hub to rival Asian Singapore,

and, more important, that big-shouldered burg,
the windy city built on mud, Chi-Town.

You had your little fifty years of fame.
At first you trapped small mammals for their fur.

And then you turned to trees, an endless fund.
Your wildcat bank made its own currency.

When bank inspectors came, you got them drunk:
brash as Tom Sawyer of St. Petersburg,

(Missouri) selling whitewash privileges.
And still folks came. They called you Ellis Island

of the Great Lakes.
                                                            And then Chicago won.
A brilliant sacrifice: by catching fire

she took your forests, leaving you the dunes.
You sold off every tree; thought they’d come back.

Or didn’t think at all, as people don’t.
Within ten years the sands had covered up

the last remaining building, though they say
one foolish Ozymandias stayed on,
acceding to his house by climbing through
a second-story window, while he could.

The literary ones called you Pompei,
though you had suffered no volcanic flow

but human greed.

                                                            But who are we to speak,
as we burn off the surface of our world,

as ice caps melt, and ocean waters rise
far past our second stories, and we stand
on rooftops and pretend it isn’t real?