How Did I Miss This?

When I moved to Fort Wayne 28 years ago (good grief - has it been that long?), nobody told me we were two hours from the beach.  Not some piddly lake beach, but a real beach that looks like Cape Cod and where you can't see across the water.  Better late than never, I guess.

Having a couple of days in between signing my lease in Chicago and needing to get back to Fort Wayne for various reasons, I thought that I'd check out the Indiana Dunes which is conveniently located between the two.

Behold a dune:

Very, very beautiful.

The Indiana Dunes is both a National Lakeshore (run by the National Park Service) and a State Park.  And on the east end, more or less, is Michigan City, which has a really great park called Washington Park.  I mean, if I were to show you the following picture of a park you would be pretty unimpressed, right?

But what if I were to tell you that if you turned around 180 degrees, you'd see this?

Now I have your attention.  Then walk about 100 yards and you'll get to this:

Yeah, I've got more respect for Michigan City now than I used to, too.

Years ago - before they destroyed it with a cruise ship pier - I'd visited Key West and, along with everyone else, made the nightly pilgrimage to Mallory Pier to watch sunset.  It was always beautiful, but honestly, Key West has nothing over sunset from the State Park beach.  Okay, other than margaritas.

Don't you agree?  And imagine the colors more beautiful and delicate than they show in that picture - the Droid isn't exactly the best camera for use at sunset.  If you look really closely at the waterline on the right side of the picture you'll see Chicago, although I can't pick out the building where I'm going to be living.

The thing about the Indiana Dunes is that they are in what Hoosiers call The Region (pronounced Da Region), which is Northwest Indiana.  There are all sorts of interesting things about The Region but the relevant one here is that its primary industry is, well, industry.  One of the largest steel making facilities in North America borders the National Lakeshore, and a large utility company has a plant right on the lake.  So  you can't really be a purist here, or these sorts of views will drive you nuts.

Of course, not being a purist is a skill that I have honed over 28 years (has it been that long?) of living in Indiana.

The State Park has camping along with a really beautiful beach.  The National Lakeshore has several beaches, a couple of historic homesteads, and (drum roll, please) Mount Baldy.  Having hiked mountains in New Mexico and Virginia, I was interested in the concept of a sand dune mountain.  They're not as big as a real mountain, of course, but they're a challenge to walk up because you're walking in sand.  Plus, they move.

The first picture in this post and the one with the power plant in the background are also Mount Baldy.  Since the mid-1930's, Mount Baldy has moved inland quite a bit, and the National Park Service has gotten worried that if nothing is done in about seven years it will cover its parking lot and then Highway 12.  So about five years ago they started planting grass (which visitors had killed by walking on it) to help stem (pardon the pun) erosion, and they've rerouted the trail.  You can still get to the top, and it's only about a 10 minute hike although it gives your legs a bit of a workout.

Here's an interesting fact:  although it is only the third largest Great Lake, Lake Michigan has had the most shipwrecks.  The State Park has the propeller from the J.D. Marshall, a steam-powered barge that sank three hundred yards offshore on June 11, 1911, during a squall.  Four men died and six survived.  Apparently storms on the Great Lakes are often more dangerous than ocean storms because their relative shallowness allows waves to crest more easily.

A real deficiency of the blog is that it doesn't have enough charts, so let me correct that here and now.  By the way, this can also serve as a handy reference guide for the names of the Great Lakes - including, as it does, Lake St. Clair which is the one that you always forget.

Michigan City is home to the Old Lighthouse Museum which is a really good museum in an old lighthouse near the Coast Guard facility and the marina.  It was home to a lighthouse keeper and an assistant keeper, and there are rooms decorated as they would have been while used as a lighthouse for about 100 years until 1940.  The museum also presents a good history of Michigan City.

At one point, Michigan City and Chicago vied for the role of premier southern Lake Michigan port.  Due to unspecified "politics," the museum notes, the government money for infrastructure all went to Chicago and that was that.  It certainly wasn't the last time that Hoosiers were outpoliticked for Federal funding.  You'd think that somebody would learn, but that is a topic for another time.

Anyway, back in the day people used to like to come by boat or train from Chicago and elsewhere to spend the day in Washington Park which had a variety of attractions along with the beach.  In 1915, the Western Electric Company in Cicero, Illinois, chartered several boats to take employees and their families across the lake for such an excursion.  About 2,500 employees and their families boarded the first of several boats, the S.S. Eastland, at the Chicago River dock.  No one seems to know what happened next but the boat rolled over and more than 800 people lost their lives.  It was the largest loss of life from a single disaster in Great Lakes history.

The museum describes a couple of other tourist attractions in Michigan City at the turn of the 20th Century.  One was the state prison - which is still here, but not so much a tourist destination anymore.  The other was a giant sand dune - 200 feet high, about three times the size of Mount Baldy - called the Hoosier Slide.

The Hoosier Slide was a landmark for people travelling on Lake Michigan - originally the Indians, and the French used it as well.  But the sand was bothersome on a windy day - plus it was handy for the burgeoning glass industry in Michigan City and especially in central Indiana, where the Ball Brothers made so many canning jars that it is not possible today to walk into an antique store anywhere in America and not see one.  So they built rail road lines right up to the dune and shipped out 30 rail cars of sand per day starting in about 1890.  By 1920 (demand had been particularly strong during World War I), the dune was gone.  At lake level, the sand was dark red and contained human bones - it seems to have been an ancient Indian burial ground, which would have been used before the dune had been created, however many hundreds or thousands of years ago that had been.

Michigan City was a stop for President Lincoln's Funeral Train.  The museum displays a map showing the route, which went from Cleveland to Columbus, Ohio, to Indianapolis then to Lafayette and up to Michigan City where it went around the lake to Chicago.  The map is covered with little clippings, including one that notes that the train did not go through Fort Wayne.  The clipping says "Fort Wayne citizens were much more kindly disposed to Lincoln the Martyred President in 1865 than they had been toward Lincoln the Politician on October 2, 1860 [during his first Presidential campaign] when he was hanged in effigy within the city limits."  The clipping does not specify a source, and I will refrain from any editorial comment on the matter.

Oh, if you visit the area, which I strongly recommend that you do, be sure to stop by Wagner's in Porter and have some terrific barbecue.

Isn't it always the case that you miss what's in your own backyard?  The good news is that I'll only be an hour away in Chicago and therefore will have an opportunity to return.  Which I will, both for the dunes and for the barbecue.