image of the Drestler cottage courtesy of the Drestler GoFundMe page

The Unquiet Sands: Lake Michigan's Shifting Shoreline

The wind that sweeps across Lake Michigan is a powerful and patient sculptor. For millennia, it has worked the shoreline, building the largest freshwater dune system in the world. This landscape of towering sand is a place of serene beauty, but it is also in constant motion. For those who have built their lives and homes along its edge, the quiet, persistent advance of the dunes is a timeless story of coexisting with a force far beyond human control.

From the buried ghost towns of the 19th century to the modern struggles of cottage owners, the history of Lake Michigan's coast is written in the sand. And while this author has no photos to share or specific details to locate one particular cottage buried under the shifting sands of Silver Lake near Lake Michigan, there is a cottage somewhere under those dunes belonging to one side of the family as well. One year the cottage was there, and a year or two later when they came back for a visit from nearby Shelby, it was gone.

image of the Gancer cottage built in 1930s, lost to Lake Michigan coastal erosion in the 2000s

The Lost Town of Singapore

But it gets even crazier. Along the coast near Saugatuck, an entire chapter of Michigan history lies buried. In the 1830s, a New York land speculator founded the town of Singapore at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, envisioning it as a rival to Chicago. For a time, it thrived. Fueled by the state’s lumber boom, Singapore became a busy mill town with a hotel, several general stores, and a population of a few hundred people. Its peak came after the Great Fire of 1871, when its mills sent vast amounts of lumber to help rebuild Chicago.

However, the clear-cutting of the protective forests left the town defenseless. Without the deep roots of the trees to anchor the soil, the lake winds began to push the dunes inland. Slowly and relentlessly, the sand moved in, piling up against buildings and swallowing streets. By the 1880s, the town was largely abandoned, its structures left to be consumed. Today, the town of Singapore exists only in memory and legend, completely entombed beneath the sands of what is now the Saugatuck Harbor Natural Area. You can learn more about its history from the Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Society.

image of Silver Lake cottage courtesy WoodTV8 used under fair use

A Modern Struggle at Silver Lake

More than a century later, the same elemental forces are at play a hundred miles up the coast at the Silver Lake Sand Dunes where this author's family cottage lies buried along with dozens of other structures. Here, a row of cottages sits in the path of an active dune field even today, 100 years after logging destabilized the dune and created this unique inland lake just on the other side of a Lake Michigan dune that has been relentlessly pushing inward for a century. But the battle against the sand is now a modern and ongoing reality for cottage owners here who planted a dream a little too close to the singing sands.

The challenges faced by property owners gained widespread attention in 2017 when a large dune, moving several feet a year, finally claimed a cottage owned by the Drestler family. News reports from outlets like WOOD-TV8 chronicled the slow-motion destruction as the house splintered under the immense weight of the sand. (I like to think of our family cottage as still sitting untouched but filled with sugar sand, but the reality is much more destructive: these buildings are pulverized as the dune shifts over them and keeps moving.)

For neighbors like Dan Behm, whose family has owned a cottage there for generations, the fight is a constant, costly effort. In an interview with Michigan Public Radio, Behm described spending tens of thousands of dollars to have sand mechanically moved away from his and his mother's cottages. This "dunefight," as he calls it, is a temporary solution against a permanent force. The situation is complex, as the dunes are also a protected, "critical dune area" under Michigan law, limiting the actions property owners can take to defend their homes.

The stories of Singapore and Silver Lake are not just about loss, but about the profound relationship between people and this unique landscape, which takes back as much as it gives. They serve as a powerful chronicle of the unquiet nature of the Great Lakes shore, a place of immense beauty and inexorable change. As climate change shifts lake levels, we may see more alteration in these dune shifting patterns, which largely affect the downwind eastern shores of all the Great Lakes except Superior, where exposed bedrock is more stable a beach than these ephemeral sugar sands that go pretty much wherever the wind leads them. Good luck trying to change it. (But if you'd like to embrace it instead, try a Silver Lake dune buggy ride, it's a trip of a lifetime.)