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Mt. Baldhead Hotel sign

Object/Artifact
Red and black painted sign for the Mount Baldhead Hotel with additional text "On river bank 1 block from noise of pike." The sign is surrounded with a black frame.
Mt. Baldhead Hotel sign hanging in the History Center's main-floor west gallery in 2026.
2008 photo from

2026.01.21

Interpretive label from "Collecting the Lakeshore" 2025-2026 at the History Center main floor gallery. Tourists Home and Mount Baldhead Hotel The Tourists Home and later Mount Baldhead Hotel appears in numerous artworks throughout this exhibit. The building occupied a prominent place between the Kalamazoo riverfront and Water Street from 1900 until its destruction by fire in 1959. The site then became home to the Ship n Shore “Boatel” in 1960. Saugatuck maintained a “working waterfront” along the Kalamazoo River into the mid-twentieth century. The hotel that appears as a yellow or weathered two-story wooden frame structure was assembled from a warehouse moved from Singapore, a blacksmith shop, and parts of a Saugatuck basket factory. It operated from 1901 as the Tourists Home until the mid-1920s. In 1933 it “rebranded” as the Mount Baldhead Hotel. The roadside Mount Baldhead Hotel sign below dates from the 1930s prior to the opening of Blue Star Highway in 1936. The “noise” described on the sign references the West Michigan “Pike” that ran along Butler Street through Saugatuck from the 1910s.

Signs1930+ Tourism, lodging, hotels and B&BsTransportation: highway and road infrastructure

Winthers, Sally

2026.01

This item has been in the possession of the SDHS since at least 2008.

*OSH Archives

Mt. Baldhead Hotel 1933-1959/Tourists' Home 1901

From "Signs of the Times: Old Signs from the Saugatuck & Douglas Area, A Collaborative Exhibition Presented by the Saugatuck Center for the Arts and the Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Society" 2008, Krista Reuter & Jim Schmiechen, curators 4. sign: Mt. Baldhead Hotel original site: Ship ‘n Shore Motel, 528 Water Street, Saugatuck collection:​Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Society Collection ​With large porches, boat docks and a riverside garden, this large hotel was cobbled together out of a nearby warehouse, a blacksmith shop, and a basket factory. Originally opened as the Tourist Home Hotel in 1901, it was owned and operated by Harry and Rhea Allen Jackson from the 1920s to 1955 when Ruth and Bud Edgcomb ran it until it was destroyed by fire in 1959.

09/19/2026

09/19/2026