SAH Domestic Study Tour

This scenic SAH Study Tour, led by James Schmiechen, Professor of History at the Center for Comparative and Transnational History, Central Michigan University and Chairperson of the Saugatuck-Douglas Historical Museum, centers on the three historic Lake Michigan port villages of Pier Cove, Douglas, and Saugatuck that are collectively known as Saugatuck" These were typical nineteenth-century port villages that grew out of the clearing of the great Michigan White Pine forests, the fishing of Lake Michigan White Fish, and the building of Great Lakes ships. Never industrialized, the villages still mirror much of their early spatial arrangement and Greek Revival and Italianate architecture. The early development of the Saugatuck area was a world of fast money, bad whiskey, and an ever-present danger of shipwreck Then, with the coming of giant Lake Michigan passenger steamships at the end of the nineteenth century, the villages were reinvented as recreational and cultural outposts for urban dwellers particularly from Chicago. Unlike many Amenican summer communities that catered to a particular class of "summer people," Saugatuck was a mecca for people of all classes and interests bohemian artists of the 1920s, outdoorsmen and women, campers, working class folks, rich industrialists, goys, social reformers, cottagers seeking the simple life of the Arts &Crafts movement, and even a few Chicago gangsters and diplomats. Together they shaped and reshaped the townscope and landscape which today is a highly attractive mix of styles including Greek Revival, Italianate, Proine School and Arts & Crafts of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Classical Revival of the 1920s, and a good helping of quirky, eclectic styles. Most important, it was here that the founders of important Chicago cultural movements such as the Chicago settlement house movement (inspired by Jane Addams) and the Oak Park-inspired Arts &Crafts movement discovered that the lake, beaches, dunes, and the woods were a source of inspiration-and settlement They were joined by some of Chicago's renowned architects, designers, and landscope architects, induding Thomas Eddy Tallmadge, John Warner Norton, Florence Hunn, George Washington Maher, and O. C. Simonds. The study tour will visit a number of their homes as well as a great voriety of Greek Revival and Colonial Revival homes, Michigan's finest Cvil War-era Italianate schoolhouse (now on the National Register),and one of America's finest Carpenter Gothic churches which was built by ship carpenters. The tour also will survey the pristine Lake Michigan landscape of dunes and woods dotted with picturesque cottages and fine summer mansions.