The history of Singapore Michigan is a truly fantastic story of a frontier boomtown gone bust. Born on the dune lands of the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan, the once prosperous city of Singapore would eventually be swallowed by the vengeful sands.
This area near Saugatuck was first settled around 1830. This was when President Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act went into effect and the Ottawa people began moving out. By 1836, when the Ottawa and Chippewa ceded their territory in the Treaty of Washington, the area was open for commercial exploitation. It was in December 1836 that a New York land speculator, Oshea Wilder, purchased the area intending to build a port city . . .

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    There's an abandoned building in Croton that I have heard was once a hunting club during prohibition. I've driven around it many times and the architecture is like an old hunting lodge with those steep, sharp-peaked, roofs. However, with large doors on one side, it could have been a carriage house for a residence that no longer exists. The story I heard claims that they had illegal booze there and that it was one of Al Capone's hideouts. I was told he would fly up the river in a pontoon plane, land on Croton Pond . . .

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    The treasure of Poverty Island, a tale of a treasure of gold lost at sea, is part of our Great Lakes legends and lore. Poverty Island is in Lake Michigan near Wisconsin, about 50 miles northwest of Leelanau County Michigan. There are a few different versions of where the treasure came from and why it was lost. What is presented below is the most repeated version.
Near the end of the Civil War, in 1862 or 1863, a Canadian ship was carrying five (or more) chests of gold (estimated at $150 million at today's prices) that was sent by France to help the Confederacy. The ship was stopped by a State of Michigan cutter, near Poverty Island. Not wanting the gold seized . . .

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