Inside the Fight to Save the Indiana Dunes, One of America’s Most Vulnerable National Parks

On February 15, 2019, a modest change of name became law. Buried deep within the lengthy appropriations bill that ended the longest federal government shutdown in United States history, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore quietly and officially became Indiana Dunes National Park. The 103-year battle to make the windswept southern shore of Lake Michigan a national park was finally over.

Centuries mean less to dunes. As glaciers retreated north some 20,000 years ago, they cut deep scars into the earth and filled the crevasses with their own meltwater. Water and wind brought sediment to the southern shore of the newly formed Lake Michigan, creating flat beaches and dramatic, moving mounds of sand known as dunes.

It’s easy to ignore these forces of natural history in a region that has long been defined by its built environment. At the edge of the park’s West Beach, the sky-blue waters of the lake are framed by steel mills and Chicago’s steel skyline. Here, the City of the Big Shoulders slouches into the marshland of Calumet, the region curved around the southern coast of Lake Michigan. Toll roads and interstates cut hundreds of feet above the low sprawl of refineries, freight yards and neighborhoods that once enjoyed something closer to prosperity. Big white trucks drive over potholes, past big white birds standing on one leg in small, low swamps. Nature is the thing you glance at, briefly, out your window.

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— Indiana Dunes (@IndianaDunesNPS) February 15, 2019

But less than ten miles down the road from what was once the world’s largest steel mill, nestled between industry and suburbs, stand 15,000 of the most biodiverse acres in North America, a patchwork of sandy lake beaches, arching dunes, humming bogs, tallgrass prairies, historic farms and shady oak forests continually threatened by reckless development and pollution.

“There is this rich, deep and broad history of contrast,” says Jason Taylor, superintendent of Indiana Dunes National Park. “My take is that’s what actually makes it so special.”

The story of how a coalition of housewives, scientists and a single committed lawmaker brought the Indiana Dunes back from the verge of destruction and turned it into a national park is one of the most understated successes of 20th-century conservation—and the battle is far from over today.

The origins of Indiana Dunes National Park

The campaign to turn the Indiana Dunes into a national park was the culmination of more than a century of conflict over the area’s development, decay and conservation.

When the National Park Service (NPS) was established in 1916, its first director, Chicago industrialist and conservationist Stephen Mather, put the dunes at the top of his list of sites in need of protection.

“If the dunes of this region were mediocre and of little scenic or scientific interest, they would have no national character and could not be regarded as more than a state or municipal park possibility,” Mather wrote in an early 1917 report. “My judgment is clear, however, that their characteristics entitle the major portion of their area to consideration as a national park project.”

Sand Dunes National Park, as the proposal called it, would have been the first national park east of the Mississippi River, accessible to millions of people in the Midwest. “Save the Dunes” was the rallying cry of local boosters, who held pageants and lectures to raise funds and bolster northwest Indiana’s national profile to protect it against the encroachments of industry.

But before the dunes could be codified into a park, the U.S. entered World War I. Federal funds were diverted to defense in Europe, not the defense of public lands. Conservationists had to resort, at least temporarily, to a revised rallying cry: “First Save the Country, Then Save the Dunes!”

In the early 1920s, when attention returned to domestic projects, dune conservation appeared impossible. Industries were already operating in the proposed boundaries of the park, driving up the cost of purchasing land. President Warren G. Harding was unsympathetic to the kind of conservation that threatened business, and Mather, once the leading voice of support for the park, lost faith in the project.

In 1977, Horace Albright, who served as assistant director of the NPS under Mather, told Kay Franklin and Norma Schaeffer, authors of Duel for the Dunes, that his boss found the site compromised by steel plants, subdevelopments and roads, making it “unacceptable for national park status.”

Albright added, “Mather was just too busy to get back to the dunes project, and he gradually came to the conclusion that the only hope for them lay in the state park movement.” For neither the first nor the last time, the fate of the Indiana Dunes was in jeopardy.

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!’”

Diana of the Dunes

With time, Ogden Dunes developed into a pleasant, planned beachfront community. Today, long roads wind over the top of dunes that have been covered by foliage and chalet-style houses for so long that they look just like the hills that make up any other suburban neighborhood.

One cottage, known as the Hour Glass, houses the town’s historical society, which keeps records of the ski jump that went up on top of a dune in 1927 and the Prairie-style house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1939.

But before these symbols of modernity snuck into town, the softly wooded dunes represented an unpopulated refuge away from the city’s avenues of steel and concrete. Few exemplified this better than Alice Mabel Gray, who boarded a South Shore Line train in Chicago in the fall of 1915 and traveled to the dunes with no plans of return.

Prior to that point, Gray’s life had been thoroughly modern for a woman of her time. She grew up in the city, studied math and languages at the University of Chicago, and took a position at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. as a “miscellaneous computer” plotting the location of stars.

Gray went to the sparsely inhabited dunes, out of range of car access and the steel thrums of Gary, to escape excess and live off the land. She ate berries and fish, lived in an abandoned fisherman’s shack, and made her furniture out of driftwood.

“She is a recluse by choice,” the Tribune reported in 1916, “and regrets that her strange retreat has been discovered by a curious world.”

The Tribune and other newspapers had no such regrets about turning Gray into the subject of unwanted media attention. The press dubbed her the “Nymph of the Dunes” and gawked at her liberated life. She lived in a small shack and bathed in the lake every afternoon, with “only a happy smile” for clothing, according to the Tribune.

After Gray bested a group of local men in shooting ducks, the Tribune started calling her “Diana of the Dunes,” after the Roman goddess of the hunt. The nickname, slightly more respectful but no less obsessive, stuck, and it now adorns trail names and T-shirts in the national park’s visitor center.

Rarely did Gray return to Chicago. On one such visit in 1916, she watched her first movie—a newsreel from the war in Europe, which made her feel “futile and self-indulgent” in her quest for personal peace, as she wrote for the Tribune. She dined among people draped in “flower-like silken gowns,” which impressed her but couldn’t compare to the wildflowers of the dunes.

“The silences and darkness out there are what I love,” she concluded. “I must go back to them at once.”

Dorothy Buell and Save the Dunes Council

As the federal government halted its effort to protect the dunes in the 1920s, development moved right along. A stretch of U.S. Route 12, nicknamed the Dunes Highway, brought national traffic to the lakefront, and Gray’s silent, dark paradise became more crowded every day. She died in a cabin known as the Wren’s Nest in 1925, the same year that the first earnest conservation of the dunes began with the establishment of Indiana Dunes State Park.

The proposal, championed by Richard Lieber, the German American father of Indiana’s state parks, won political support because it wasn’t very ambitious. Although it protected more than 2,000 acres of unspoiled land, the park was still relatively small in comparison with the ten thousand or more acres in Mather’s original proposal.

Still, even minor acts of conservation and appreciation came at the loss of isolation in the dunes. In the first three months the state park was open, 63,000 visitors flocked to it. Coastal towns like Ogden Dunes and Long Beach grew, with residents attracted by ads that promoted the best of nature and the conveniences of modernity, like “25 miles of winding concrete boulevards,” as well as “gas, running water, electricity [and] foodstuff deliveries.” You could have your wilderness and slowly civilize it, too.

In 1949, Dorothy Buell, a resident of Ogden Dunes, returned from a vacation to White Sands National Park in New Mexico with her husband. “Although she was enthralled by the great stretch of pure white sand,” wrote J. Ronald Engel in Sacred Sands: The Struggle for Community in the Indiana Dunes, “she found its beauty inferior to the duneland surrounding her home.”

“If the federal government can afford to buy all that white sand, why can’t it do the same for our dunes?” Buell reportedly asked her husband.

After attending several meetings of the Indiana Dunes Preservation Council, a group that identified untouched lakefront in need of protection but struggled to effect change, Buell gathered a group of 21 local women in her living room. Save the Dunes Council, Buell’s own conservation group, was born on June 20, 1952.

The nascent conservation group undertook national fundraising drives to purchase unclaimed lakefront acreage and protect it from Bethlehem Steel’s proposed construction of a massive deep-water port, Burns Harbor, that would destroy massive sections of the dunes. The council’s first purchase was Cowles Bog—a rare glacial wetland filled with beavers, red maples and yellow birches; a muck of swamp water and marsh plants; blackberries; and, eventually, reintroduced purple orchids—acquired in 1953 for $1,730 (around $20,000 today).

But a small grassroots group can only buy so much land by itself. Save the Dunes soon pivoted to legislative tactics.

Indiana’s congressional delegation was, on the whole, supportive of the port project, friendly to steel corporations and apathetic toward conservation. Its members would be of no help to Buell and her group. Senator Paul H. Douglas, from neighboring Illinois, felt differently. He had a summer cabin in the dunes, where he’d spent many happy hours with his family, and he responded positively to Buell’s proposal for a national park—a last-ditch effort to protect the wonders of northwest Indiana from the bulldozers of Bethlehem Steel.

“When I was young, I hoped to save the world,” the senator once said. “In my middle years, I would have been content to save my country. Now, I just want to save the dunes.”

Douglas’ simple plea for preservation was met with vitriolic opposition from Indiana’s business and media class. Newspapers complained about the state’s unelected “third senator,” who overstepped and acted like a “millstone” around Indiana’s neck.

Beginning in 1958, Douglas began the lengthy process of repeatedly introducing bills supporting the protection of Indiana Dunes as a national monument, a national scientific landmark or a national lakeshore. (These types of sites fall under NPS management, but they don’t carry the coveted title of “national park,” which only applies to 63 of the 430 units overseen by the federal agency.) He lobbied local, state and federal authorities, in addition to offering tours of the dunes to Interior Secretary Stewart Udall and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley. In 1962, Douglas brought his personal photographs of the lakeshore to the White House, making overt comparisons to President John F. Kennedy’s beloved Cape Cod National Seashore, formally established the year before.

Fourteen years passed between the creation of Save the Dunes and November 5, 1966, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the bill that finally saved the dunes. By then, the Burns Harbor port had already been built, and the heart of the lakefront, known as Central Dunes, had been bulldozed to serve as landfill for an expansion of Northwestern University. But there was still a patchwork of dunes left to protect, wedged between steel mills and harbors, between suburbs and cities.

The Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore’s “beaches and woodlands will provide a haven for the bird lover, the beachcomber, the botanist, the hiker, the camper and the swimmer,” said Johnson in a statement marking the bill’s signing. “For these people, as well as for millions of other visitors, the [site] offers ideal recreational opportunities. Here, man can find solace and relief from the pressures of the industrial world.”

A federally protected lakefront was, at long last, reality.

From a national lakeshore to a national park

The establishment of the national lakeshore in 1966 didn’t signal the end of the battle over land in northwest Indiana. Through the 1990s, the NPS gradually purchased property on the lake to add to the protected lands, but the site experienced growing pains as it found its place among local communities.

For many years, critics in these communities, as well as on a federal level, opposed an upgrade to national park status. In towns like Ogden Dunes and nearby Beverly Shores, Meister says, “There is that sort of real sense of keeping outsiders out.” Increased tourism that would come with the name change was a double-edged sword, and the lakeshore, in locals’ view, was already protected and governed at an appropriate level.

In written testimony to a Senate subcommittee in 2018, P. Daniel Smith, then-acting director of the NPS, wrote, “Indiana Dunes has more in common with the other Great Lakes national lakeshores … than with most national parks. Indiana Dunes is the smallest of the four lakeshore units, and the only one of the four that does not include any designated wilderness.”

Unlike in the 1950s, however, Indiana’s congressional delegation enthusiastically supported a national park that would boost the region’s profile. Pete Visclosky, a longtime advocate of improving the lakefront who represented northwest Indiana in Congress from 1985 to 2021, slipped the final measure into an appropriations bill that lawmakers and President Donald Trump were eager to sign for completely different reasons. The work of more than a century was over: Indiana had its first, and to date only, national park.

The future of the Indiana Dunes

The work of the dunes’ next century will be growing into its national status while building stronger relationships with the millions of people who live within a few hours’ drive.

“I wouldn’t expect a monotypic need from all the communities,” says Taylor, who started his position as the park’s superintendent in March. “Lots of people like lots of different things.”

Taylor speaks of the value that Indiana Dunes can provide to its gateway towns (communities located just outside of national parks and historic sites). By sticking to its mission of protecting and restoring natural resources, he says, the park keeps “a moment of quiet … easily accessible” in a region that has long been overshadowed by industry and its gray remnants.

The contrast between nature and its surroundings is the essence—and importance—of the park. As visitors walk through a restored prairie, tallgrass up to their waist, yellow birds landing on yellow wildflowers, they might hear a Norfolk Southern freight train rumble toward Chicago. But the prairie, the tallgrass and the wildflowers are still there. “It’s not Yellowstone, it’s not Yosemite,” Taylor says. “But it’s not supposed to be.”

Save the Dunes, animated by these same beliefs, is still a major conservation group in the region (and still run by women). In recent years, it’s taken a similar turn toward reaching out to local residents, not just the wealthier lakefront towns affected by park development.

“It’s a lot about having really genuine and empathetic conversations,” says Em Racine, the group’s community engagement coordinator, who spends her days shuttling between places like Gary’s public libraries and the Chamber of Commerce, reminding schoolchildren and power brokers alike that the dunes are a unique fantasia of biodiversity, just down the road.

Though 60 percent of annual visitors to the park are from out of state, locals experience the brunt of the region’s environmental challenges, which are largely caused by the glut of industry still concentrated on the southern rim of Lake Michigan.

“We have a front-row seat to climate change in northwest Indiana,” says Betsy Maher, executive director of Save the Dunes. “It is very real and, in many ways, very tangible for us here.”

Some of the most toxic industrial sites in the country are within view of the park’s beaches, offering a sour reminder that the effects of water and air pollution stick around, even with improved regulation. Stronger storms and rising water levels on Lake Michigan, as well as influxes in visitation to the national park, are exacerbating coastal and dune erosion. But these are the challenges that the NPS, Save the Dunes and other environmental justice groups in northwest Indiana signed up for. These are the stakes of protecting the Indiana Dunes.

“Our founder Dorothy Buell said, ‘We are prepared to spend the rest of our lives if necessary to save the dunes,’” Maher explains. “She didn’t know at the time how important and true that statement was.”