60. Village Pump House

Location: Mt. Baldhead Park at 735 Park Street, Saugatuck
Date: 1904, 1910 with later restorations

Saugatuck’s Pump House after its 1910 addition for electric generators. 

This Craftsman-style building housed Saugatuck’s first municipal water system that provided clean, reliable water and made the fear of fire less a part of daily life. The system was engineered in 1904 by John Watson Alvord, principal engineer of the Chicago Water System, and, conveniently, a summer resident of Shorewood on the Douglas Lakeshore. Water drawn from wells at the foot of Mount Baldhead was pumped by gasoline engines in the Pump House up to a 100,000-gallon reservoir at the top of Lone Pine Dune (the next dune north of Mt. Baldhead). The gravity-fed water flowed through pipes laid under the Kalamazoo River to the buildings and hydrants in Saugatuck. In 1910, the Pump House building was doubled in size to make space for the village’s first electricity-generating station. By the 1950s, with water and electric service relocated elsewhere, the building fell into disrepair. In the 1970s, the Dr. William Shorey family of Chicago who restored the structure for use as a summer cottage. Since 1994, the building and has housed the award-winning Historical Museum. An accessable garden ramp was in 1995. The brick Wilson entry pavilion was dedicated in 2001 in honor of James “Stan” Wilson, the museum’s first graphic designer.