Towns of sand and steel
The first time the Indiana Dunes faced a major threat to their existence was in 1905, when the United States Steel Corporation (more commonly known as U.S. Steel) bought thousands of acres of land on the southern shore of Lake Michigan. There, the company built a leviathan steel mill and an accompanying town named after its founding chairman, Elbert Henry Gary.
City planners laid out Gary’s grid atop the marshes where the rich men of Chicago once spent their weekends hunting and tramping around Calumet, and where the Potawatomi and Miami people lived for 12,000 years before them. U.S. Steel’s Gary Works mill rose atop of leveled dunes.
“When I was in grade school, even in high school, the steel industry was the lifeblood of virtually everybody that I knew [and] came in contact with,” says Dick Meister, a retired historian who grew up in Miller Beach, a suburban lakefront neighborhood of Gary, in the 1940s.
In the booming heyday of northwest Indiana, industry and progress plowed through nature—or, for that matter, anything—that stood in their way. For most residents, Meister recalls, concern about the environment was reduced to a sad joke: “If you can see the clouds, people are out of work.”
When interstate highways were constructed in Meister’s corner of Indiana in the 1950s, his neighbors sold the sand from dunes and beaches on their property for use in tarmac and concrete. But turning sand directly into profit—an immediate sacrifice of the natural for the humanmade—was hardly a new hazard for the dunes.
In fact, sand extraction was the original lifeblood of Ogden Dunes, where Meister now lives. Adjacent to the national park, the town is named after Francis A. Ogden, a Midwestern millionaire and nephew of the first mayor of Chicago. As the Chicago Tribune reported in 1906, Ogden owned 2.5 miles of sand dunes on the Indiana border of Lake Michigan.
“That will be worth $1,000,000 one of these days,” the septuagenarian told the Tribune, his face apparently brightening at the thought. “What will make that Indiana shore worth $1,000,000? Simply the 4,400,000 carloads of sand which can be loaded for $2 a car.”
Conveniently for capitalists like Ogden, dunes seemed to replenish themselves with every gust of wind. His lakefront property was a cornucopia of profit. “I used to complain of the cold northeasters down the lake,” the millionaire said to the Tribune, “until the thought occurred to me, ‘Why, they are bringing you down sand at every gale!’”