The World's Largest Musical Fountain at Dewey Hill

Look across the Grand River at that steep sandy bluff. That is Dewey Hill, and after dark on a summer night it comes alive with a fountain that was once the largest musical fountain in the world. It was built by local volunteers in nineteen sixty-two, at a cost of around fifty thousand dollars, and designed by a Grand Haven engineer named William Booth.

The idea came from a former mayor, a dentist named William Creason, who had seen a musical fountain in Germany during the Second World War and thought his hometown deserved one too. The first public show ran on Memorial Day, the thirtieth of May, nineteen sixty-three. Water shoots as high as one hundred twenty-five feet, sweeping and fanning and folding in time with music, lit in colors that pour across the river.

It held the title of world's largest musical fountain until the fountains of the Bellagio in Las Vegas opened in nineteen ninety-eight. The shows run nightly through the summer, drawing something like one hundred thousand people a year to sit on the boardwalk across the water and watch a little Michigan town out-dance Las Vegas for thirty-five years running.