Indian Burial Grounds

Location: Saugatuck Village Hall Area

The earliest settlers found the remnants of an old Indian cemetery on the flat land at the foot of the hill in Saugatuck about where the Village Hall was later built, at the northwest corner of Culver and Butler streets. The appropriated a portion of the land as a settlement cemetery until about 1860 when a new cemetery opened on the road to Holland, north of the village, and the graves from the old plots were moved. In the late 1920s a basement was dug in the Village Hall and about 30 Indian graves were uncovered. Items from the burials were on display at an informal museum upstairs in the hall, and the bones were reburied in a small mound across Culver Street, with a boulder and stone tablet nearby dedicated in 1930 “to the memory of the old Indian burying ground.” During street widening in the 1970s the small mound was bulldozed, but the boulder and tablet remain.

Another known Indian burial site is at the approximate location of the south end of the Oval Beach parking lot. It is also told that Indians buried some of their dead (including children) on Mt. Baldhead, the principal ritual site for area Indians.