38 Fun Facts About Indiana Dunes National Park

Indiana Dunes National Park's western end, around Miller Woods, lies inside which steel city?

Gary holds the park's western tip: Miller Woods lies between the city's Miller Beach neighborhood and the Gary Works mill, so a national park trail starts next door to a working steel plant.

The 2019 law making Indiana Dunes a national park rode inside what kind of bill?

A federal spending bill carried the rename: the stand-alone version passed the House in 2017 but never got a Senate vote, so sponsors folded it into the February 2019 funding package.

Why did the Park Service oppose national park status for Indiana Dunes?

The Park Service said it fit better with lakeshores and seashores, since national parks are usually far larger; Congress overruled its own agency and renamed the site anyway in 2019.

Which steel company built its Burns Harbor mill on leveled dunes in the 1960s?

Bethlehem Steel bulldozed the dunes for its Burns Harbor mill and sold some 2.5 million cubic yards of the sand as fill, which Northwestern University used to push its Evanston campus out into Lake Michigan.

Henry Cowles's 1899 study of Indiana Dunes plant life helped launch which science in America?

Ecology: Cowles learned Danish to read Eugen Warming's book on plant communities, then tested its ideas on Lake Michigan's shore.

Which first National Park Service director held 1916 hearings on a Sand Dunes National Park?

Stephen Mather drew about 400 people to his Chicago hearing and not one spoke against the park, yet America's entry into World War I shelved the idea for half a century.

The Hoosier Slide, a 200-foot Indiana dune gone by 1920, was hauled away chiefly for what use?

Making glass: Ball Brothers of Muncie turned the sand into blue-tinted canning jars and Hemingray into insulators, so Michigan City's landmark dune left town by the boxcar.

Who founded and led the Save the Dunes Council from 1952 to 1968?

Dorothy Buell gathered local women at her Ogden Dunes home in June 1952, reasoning that women had won the state park a generation earlier and could win again.

How did the Save the Dunes Council get its first 56 acres of duneland in 1953?

Bought it at a tax sale: Cowles Tamarack Bog cost $1,730, and part of the money came from the leftover treasury of the failed 1916 national park campaign.

Which Illinois senator led the congressional fight to save the dunes in the 1960s?

Paul Douglas took up the fight in 1958 because Indiana's own delegation sided with industry; opponents mocked the Illinois senator as the third senator from Indiana.

The so-called Kennedy Compromise of the 1960s paired the new park with what?

The Kennedy Compromise gave industry a deepwater port at Burns Harbor and conservationists their lakeshore; the save-the-dunes camp took it bitterly, since the dunes they had fought hardest for were already bulldozed.

Which wandering dune at the east end of Indiana Dunes rolls several feet inland every year?

Mount Baldy moves because trampling killed the marram grass that pinned it down, so it is slowly burying its own parking lot; the summit now opens only on ranger-led hikes.

What did scientists name the hidden shafts in Indiana Dunes' big moving sand hill after one swallowed a boy in 2013?

Decomposition chimneys form where buried black oaks rot away and leave hollow shafts under loose sand; in 2013 a six-year-old boy was dug out alive after more than three hours about 11 feet down.

What nickname did Indiana Dunes beaches earn for the squeak they make underfoot?

Singing sands squeak underfoot because the beach is mostly clean quartz left by glaciers; the park even named its visitor newspaper The Singing Sands.

Indiana Dunes' five Century of Progress houses came from which event?

The 1933 Chicago World's Fair showed them as homes of tomorrow; in 1935 developer Robert Bartlett floated four of them across Lake Michigan by barge to lure buyers to his resort at Beverly Shores.

Which University of Chicago graduate, living alone in the dunes from 1915, was nicknamed Diana of the Dunes?

Alice Mabel Gray, a mathematics graduate, left Chicago on Halloween 1915 with a blanket and two pistols; a newspaper likened her duck shooting to the Roman goddess of the hunt, and the name stuck.

Which French-Canadian fur trader, among the first known settlers of the Indiana dunes, opened a trading post there in the 1820s?

Joseph Bailly arrived just as the fur trade was fading, so he turned innkeeper and land speculator where two old trails crossed; his family's Bailly Homestead still stands in the park.

The Chellberg Farm preserved at Indiana Dunes represents settlers from which country?

Anders and Johanna Kjellberg left Sweden in 1863 and respelled the name Chellberg; three generations worked the farm until grandson Carl sold it to the Park Service in 1972.

Which small, federally endangered shorebird has stretches of Indiana Dunes beach set aside as critical habitat?

Piping plover numbers on the Great Lakes once fell below 20 pairs; the birds nested on these beaches historically, so in 2001 about five miles of dunes shoreline, state park included, was named critical habitat for their recovery.

Pinhook Bog, an outlying unit of Indiana Dunes National Park, fills a hollow left by what?

A melting block of ice, stranded by the retreating glacier some 14,000 years ago, left the hollow; moss then grew a floating mat across the water, so the bog's boardwalk sinks underfoot as visitors cross.

In 1913, which touring Europeans ranked the Indiana dunes with Yellowstone, Yosemite and the Grand Canyon as America's must-see sights?

Botanists from Europe, led across the country by Chicago professor Henry Cowles, agreed the Lake Michigan dunes were worth seeing on even the briefest American trip; he retold the story at the 1916 national park hearings.

Which glacial ridge behind the Indiana Dunes is named for the Indiana college city on its crest?

The Valparaiso Moraine is also a continental divide: rain on its north slope drains to Lake Michigan and the Atlantic, while rain on its south slope heads for the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico.

Which ancient beach ridge at Indiana Dunes, the middle of three, shares its name with the surrounding region and its rivers?

Calumet is the middle step of a staircase the shrinking lake left behind: the Glenwood ridge stands about 60 feet above today's water, Calumet about 40 and Tolleston about 25.

What winter hazard forms along Indiana Dunes beaches when wind and waves pile lake ice into hollow ridges?

Shelf ice builds out from the beach without ever freezing to the lake bottom, so a thin spot can give way like a trapdoor into frigid water; the park forbids stepping onto it.

When are rip currents most likely along Indiana Dunes beaches?

In a strong north wind, waves have some 300 miles of open lake to build before hitting this southern shore; water piles up behind the sandbar, then bursts back out through a gap and drags swimmers with it.

Which prairie remnant near Griffith, a National Natural Landmark, is an outlying unit of Indiana Dunes National Park?

Hoosier Prairie is kept open the old way, with controlled burns that kill invading trees; though it lies inside the park boundary, most of it is owned and run by Indiana's Department of Natural Resources.

The name of the park's Mnoké Prairie restoration, suggested by Potawatomi elders, means what?

Mnoké is a Potawatomi word meaning 'good earth', with 'mno' meaning good; Potawatomi elders suggested the name for the restored prairie in the central part of the park.

Which post-war prefab house, built from porcelain-enameled steel panels, survives at Beverly Shores inside Indiana Dunes National Park?

Lustron homes were factory-built to ease the post-war housing shortage; the park's examples stand near the Armco-Ferro House, a 1930s steel-and-enamel show home whose design inspired them.

The Oak Savannah rail trail through the park's Hobart Prairie Grove follows which old railroad?

The Oak Savannah Trail runs about nine miles from Hobart to Griffith on the former Elgin, Joliet and Eastern line; two miles cross Hobart Prairie Grove, a rare bur oak savanna above Lake George.

Which fossils, stem discs of ancient sea lilies, wash up on Indiana Dunes beaches but may not be taken home?

Crinoids were animals, relatives of sea stars, from a warm sea that covered Indiana some 450 million years ago; their stem discs look like stone Cheerios, and only beach glass, counted as litter, may leave the park.

Which of the three Tremont dunes in Indiana Dunes State Park stands tallest, 192 feet above Lake Michigan?

Mount Tom caps the state park's 3 Dune Challenge, a 1.5-mile loop with 552 vertical feet of loose sand; oddly, the tallest dune is the kindest climb, because it alone has a staircase.

Indiana Dunes' Great Marsh, once a haven for migrating birds, was wrecked over a century ago by what?

Draining through ditches, dug to make farms and house lots, dropped the water table until trees crept in and the marsh birds left; since 1998 the park has been plugging them again, starting with Derby Ditch.

Indiana Dunes covers only about 15,000 acres, yet it ranks among the top five national parks for what?

Biodiversity runs high because several ecological zones overlap here, so arctic, desert, prairie and forest species live within a short walk; the Great Smokies and Grand Canyon are among the few parks that count more.

Indiana Dunes' Portage Lakefront and Riverwalk, with its beach and pavilion, was built on land once used for what?

Steel mill waste ponds and a sewage plant once filled the site; the steelmaker cleaned it up, the Park Service took it over, and dunes were replanted around a pavilion set on the old plant's footprint.

Indiana Dunes' Bailly Homestead was designated what in 1962, four years before the park around it existed?

A National Historic Landmark since 1962, the homestead earned the title as a rare surviving fur-trade post and pioneer home.

Which president signed the 1966 act creating Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore?

Lyndon B. Johnson signed it on November 5, 1966, calling the bill 50 years in the making; Kennedy had brokered the compromise behind it but was assassinated in 1963, three years before Congress finally passed it.

Which commuter railroad serves the park at stations such as Dune Park and Miller?

The South Shore Line, the electric interurban from Millennium Station in the Loop to South Bend, stops at Miller, Portage/Ogden Dunes, Dune Park and Beverly Shores, all inside or beside the park.

Which engineer tested gliders on the Indiana dunes in 1896, producing a biplane design the Wright brothers later adapted?

Octave Chanute, a bridge engineer in his sixties, left the flying to his young assistants in the summer of 1896, and he freely shared what they learned with the Wright brothers.