15. Old Harbor

Location: The Ox-Bow Lagoon, Saugatuck

The 1859 Kalamazoo lighthouse is visible on the far left side of this photo. The rustic buildings to the right are the shanties and dwellings of Fishtown.

In the days before radar or global positioning systems, every harbor with aspirations included a lighthouse. Saugatuck’s first lighthouse, built in 1839, was a thirty-foot rubble-stone tower with an array of six lamps and 14-inch reflectors to produce a fixed light 42 feet above Lake Michigan. Merchant and entrepreneur Steven D. Nichols served as the first lighthouse keeper from 1839 to 1844. He also built a warehouse, tavern and wharf nearby on the north side of the Saugatuck Harbor. On the south side of the harbor were two rival warehouses; one operated by William Butler and the other by H. H. Comstock.

The lighthouse’s sixth-order Fresnel lens replaced the lamps and reflectors in 1856 but the stone tower was being undermined by erosion. In 1859, a second lighthouse was built farther from the river as a replacement. This structure was a two-story dwelling with a square tower perched atop its pitched roof.

In 1876, the light from Kalamazoo Lighthouse was transferred to a new frame structure erected at the end of the south pier at the entrance to the river. Keeper Samuel Underwood continued to reside in the 1859 lighthouse, but had to row across the river multiple times a day to tend the light. The steamer Charles McVea collided with the south pier in 1892, damaging the pier and pierhead tower. As a result, the light was transferred back to the 1859 lighthouse. On May 23, 1894, a fixed red lantern light was installed on the outer end of the south pier. This light was accessed via an elevated walk.

In 1906, a new entrance to Kalamazoo River was opened roughly a mile to the north, requiring a new light to mark the mouth of the river. A concrete post and platform with a fixed red lens lantern was erected at the end of the new south pier in 1907. This new pier-head light was known as Saugatuck Harbor North Entrance Light while the 1859 lighthouse remained in operation as Kalamazoo Light.

On October 6, 1914, a second pier-head light was established at the new harbor channel and the light in the 1859 lighthouse was extinguished. Not long thereafter, the lantern room was removed from the 1859 lighthouse.

Frederick Fursman, co-founder of the Summer School of Painting (now Saugatuck’s Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency), rented the decommissioned Kalamazoo Lighthouse from the government for ten dollars a year from about 1915 to 1935. Arthur F. Deam, a professor of architecture, sublet the lighthouse from Fursman for a couple of years and then leased the lighthouse from the government before acquiring the property in 1937.

On April 3, 1956, a tornado destroyed the 1859 lighthouse. Arthur Deam salvaged remnants of the structure and incorporated them into a new lighthouse-inspired cottage that he and his son Edward had built in 1962 on the old lighthouse’s foundation. It remains a Deam family private cottage to this day.