Indiana Dunes A Signature of Time and Eternity: The Administrative History of Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Indiana

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Should public regard or private means procure it for the country, it will be the only national park within reach of millions of workers for weekend pleasure. The Yosemite, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Adirondack, White Mountain, and other national parks always will be sacred to the few who have money and plenty of time. Here is a chance for the powers that be to show regard for the working people of the middle West, who are, after all, the pillars of America. Could there not be at least one national park within reach of the masses of the citizens and their children?

"Miss McCauley's Column," circa 1918 [1]

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Settling the Dunes

Fur trader Joseph Bailly was one of the first known Euroamerican settlers in the Calumet region of what later became northwest Indiana and northeast Illinois. Prior to Bailly's arrival in 1822, however, the area was traversed by various peoples. Most archeological evidence of prehistoric settlement suggests the harsh topography of the Calumet—swamps and sand dunes—deterred anything but transient habitation. Indians came to the area during the summer and then migrated to the Kankakee River area to winter. By the seventeenth century, the Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Wea tribes occupied the region when French explorers arrived to claim the area as "New France." Father Jacques Marquette led one of the first groups of French fur traders and missionaries through the Calumet in 1675. In 1753, the French and their Indian allies operated a fur depot, Petite Fort, which was near the mouth of Fort Creek, within today's Indiana Dunes State Park. With Great Britain's triumph in the Seven Years' War, the entire Ohio valley became the reserve of British fur traders who used Petite Fort until reverses in the American Revolutionary War forced them to abandon it in 1779.

Post-bellum American settlers flocked to the fertile farmland of the southern Indiana Territory, avoiding the swamps and dunes of the Calumet as an inhospitable no man's land. Six years after Indiana attained statehood in 1816, Joseph Bailly and his family became one of the first known settlers of the "Indiana Dunes." Bailly, a Canadian fur trapper, was the first to recognize the area's commercial potential, but by the time of his "squatting" on Indian lands, the fur trade was in decline. Bailly built a trading post on the Little Calumet River, between the Lake Shore Trail—the trace connecting Fort Dearborn (Chicago) and Detroit—and the Calumet Beach Trail. By settling the area, Bailly hoped to prosper from the travelers along the latter trail. The continued decline in the fur trade, however, forced Bailly to open a tavern to prevent his indebtedness from further escalating.

A mail route was established in 1831, followed two years later by a stage line along the Calumet Beach Trail (present-day Highway 12). When Michigan City was platted in 1833, additional settlers arrived and land speculation boomed. The same year saw the signing of the Treaty of Chicago and the removal of the last Indian reservations in the area. Bailly, joining in the speculation fray, platted a village one mile northwest of his homestead site called "Bailly Town." The new settlement failed following Bailly's death in 1835. Joseph Bailly's legacy is physically reflected in the form of several log structures as well as the family's large home, construction of which began in 1835.

The Bailly family subsequently began a sawmill business to supply the area's building boom. In the 1860s, this logged-over land was sold to Swedish immigrants such as the Chellbergs (Kjellberg) who established productive farms along the periphery of the Indiana Dunes. The Swedes were followed by an influx of German settlers. [2]

By the turn of the century booming communities on Indiana's lakeshore included Whiting, Hammond, East Chicago, Woods Mill, Crown Point, Chesterton, and Porter. In LaPorte County, Michigan City prospered with its harbor and a growing number of industries. To the west, Porter County was principally agrarian with small towns built along several railroad lines which gave farmers access to the vast Chicago marketplace. Along the lakeshore dune ridges towered nearly 200 feet above Lake Michigan. The area featured interdunal ponds and blowouts stretching nearly a mile inland. Behind these dunes was the "Great Marsh," a band of swampy terrain extending from Michigan City across Porter County to what is now Lake Street in Lake County. Further to the south was another band of dunes where the Chicago, South Bend, and South Shore Railroad and a series of roads were built, and beyond that were the farm fields. In Lake County, a low ridge of dunes skirted the lakeshore and abutted the wetlands of the Grand and Little Calumet rivers. There were very few people who lived in these desolate areas. [3]

The Early Preservation Movement

Henry C. Cowles' investigations while a botany student at the University of Chicago formed the foundation of the dunes preservation movement. In 1899, the Botanical Gazette published Cowles' work, "Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan," and set the course of modern botany. Cowles meticulously documented the intricate microcosm of plant life amidst the bogs, woodlands, dunes, and swamps in an area between Mount Tom and Mount Holden in present-day Indiana Dunes State Park. Cowles' efforts established a new discipline of plant ecology; early animal ecologists also adapted Cowles' methodology. Henry Cowles' concentration on the Indiana Dunes brought international attention to its intricate ecosystem. [4]

As early as the 1880s, a decade preceding Cowles' study, commercial interests began exploiting the lakeshore. Sand mining companies hauled huge quantities of sand from the dunes for use in Chicago landfills and building industries. In one unpopulated area near the mouth of the Grand Calumet River, the Illinois Steel Company, a subsidiary of U.S. Steel, purchased land in 1905 and began constructing a new steel manufacturing plant the following year. A new community, named after the corporation's finance committee chairman, Elbert H. Gary, thrived nearby. Woodlands, swamps, and dunes were eradicated to accommodate the new structures. [5]

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, it was apparent that the urban industrial sprawl from Chicago would continue its rapid encroachment on the Indiana Dunes. Hoosier Slide, just west of Michigan City, at 200 feet high was the largest sand dune on Indiana's lakeshore and a popular attraction for climbing and sliding. In twenty years, the Ball Brothers of Muncie, Indiana, manufacturers of glass fruit jars, and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company of Kokomo, Indiana, carried Hoosier Slide away in railroad boxcars. Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO) bought the denuded site to build a power generating station. [6]

From Gary to Michigan City, industry ringed Indiana's lakeshore. Local residents and some Chicagoans recognized the threat and organized to meet it. In 1908, the Playground Association of Chicago initiated the "Saturday Afternoon Walks" in the dunes. The popularity of the weekly event prompted Thomas W. Allinson, Jens Jensen, and Henry C. Cowles to form the Prairie Club of Chicago in 1911. All three men served on the club's conservation committee with industrialist Stephen T. Mather, future first Director of the National Park Service. For the Midwest, the Prairie Club became the counterpart of the Appalachian Trail Club in the East and the Sierra Club in the West. The Prairie Club was the first group to propose that a portion of the Indiana Dunes be protected from commercial interests and maintained in its pristine condition for the enjoyment of the people. [7] The following year club president Jens Jensen purchased "the Beach House" east of Mount Tom in Tremont where the group could assemble and strategize. For thirteen years, Jensen, the "Dean of American Landscape Architects" and Superintendent of the Chicago Park System, spoke throughout the region promoting the dunes and earning for himself the title "Apostle of the Dunes." Friends of Our Native Landscape, founded in 1913 by Jensen and dedicated to the "spiritual power in the American landscape," joined the Prairie Club for the weekend walks in the dunes. [8]

The idea of establishing a park in the Indiana Dunes germinated for several years, and the concept blossomed in the spring of 1916. Rumors circulated about the impending dredging of Fort Creek at Waverly Beach to accommodate Lake Michigan ships loading sand directly from railroad cars. Many were convinced Mount Tom was to go the way of Hoosier Slide. When Prairie Club members staged their annual picnic at the Beach House, they decided to take the offensive against the industrial interests despoiling the Indiana Dunes. They voted to form the National Dunes Park Association (NDPA) to promote the establishment of a national park on Indiana's lakeshore. On July 16, a mass meeting at Waverly Beach to inaugurate the effort resulted in three special trains from Chicago carrying 5,000 people to the dunes. With a theme of "A National Park for the Middle West, and all the Middle West for a National Park," a principal goal was to raise money to buy enough duneland to turn over to the Federal Government for a national park. Elected officers of the NDPA were Armanis F. Knotts, Thomas H. Cannon, and Mrs. Frank (Bess) Sheehan. On the board of directors were Jens Jensen, Henry C. Cowles, John O. Bowers, and George M. Pinneo.

The popular appeal of the NDPA's message was phenomenal. Less than two months later, on September 7, U.S. Senator Thomas Taggart (Democrat-Indiana) successfully presented Resolution 268 before the Senate calling on Secretary of the Interior Franklin K. Lane to explore the feasibility of obtaining segments of three Indiana counties for a Sand Dunes National Park.* The stage was set for the opening round of the battle for a park in the Indiana Dunes. [9]

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*Thomas Taggart served as Mayor of Indianapolis (1895-1901) and Chairman of the Democratic National Committee (1900-1908). On March 20, 1916, Taggart was appointed to the United States Senate to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Senator Benjamin F. Shively. On November 7, 1916, following the general election in which he ran to fill the position, Taggart resigned upon his defeat. The first national legislative heralder of the save the dunes movement died in Indianapolis on March 6, 1929. See U.S. Senate Document No. 92-8, Biographical Directory of the American Congress, 1774-1971 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971), p. 1786.

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Stephen T. Mather and the Sand Dunes National Park

Stephen Tyng Mather left Chicago in 1915 to serve as an assistant to his friend, Franklin K. Lane, President Woodrow Wilson's Secretary of the Interior. Mather, a wealthy Chicago borax manufacturer imbued with a deep appreciation of the environment, went to Washington to manage the neglected national parks. On August 25, 1916, President Wilson signed the National Park Service Act, and Lane later appointed Mather the first director of the new bureau. As a member of two organizations promoting a Sand Dunes National Park, Mather found himself in an ideal position to promote just such an entity to benefit his native Chicago and the Midwest. Within two weeks of the National Park Service Act, Mather met with Senator Taggart to draft a resolution authorizing an investigation of the "advisability of the securing, by purchase or otherwise, all that portion of the counties of Lake, Laporte, and Porter, in the State of Indiana, bordering upon Lake Michigan, and commonly known as the 'Sand dunes,' with a view that such lands be created a national park." While Congress made no appropriation for the study, local preservation groups assumed Mather's expenses, including a one-week trip to the dunes, Chicago, and Michigan City. [10]

Mather held hearings on October 30 to gauge local sentiment on the proposed national park. Meeting in a courtroom in the Chicago Federal Building, 400 people attended and forty-two spoke in favor of the park to "save the dunes." There were no opponents. Individuals testifying were Henry C. Cowles, University of Chicago botanist; Earl H. Reed, artist and writer; Otis Caldwell, Chicago Historical Society president; Lorado Taft, sculptor (and future father-in-law of U.S. Senator Paul H. Douglas); T. C. Chamberlain, University of Chicago geologist; and Julius Rosenwald, founder of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. Some other organizations represented were the Prairie Club, Indiana Academy of Science, Chicago Association of Commerce, and the Illinois Audubon Society.

The most convincing testimony was that of Henry Cowles. The botanist had dedicated twenty years of his life to the Indiana Dunes and still took his students there for intensive academic study. The dunes were known throughout the world for their ecological importance. Cowles related the story of a group of European scientists with only two months in the United States who compiled a list of places to spend their time: the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the dunelands of southern Lake Michigan. [11]

Mather's assistant, Horace M. Albright, accompanied him to the dunes and compiled the National Park Service's report to Congress, [12] which was submitted to Secretary Lane on December 20. The document represented a potential turning point for Federal land acquisition policy for the Park Service director proposed the government purchase the land for a national park from private interests, a practice hitherto verboten by Congress. He cited the example of the $50,000 appropriation to buy a tract in Sequoia National Park which was insufficient to meet the $70,000 price tag, the deficit amount coming from the National Geographic Society. Mather identified a strip of lakeshore twenty-five miles long and one mile wide for acquisition. This represented 9,000 to 13,000 acres at a price of $1.8 to $2.6 million. The park should be "contiguous and dignified," with no isolated tracts outstanding, Mather believed.

Federal developments in the Sand Dunes National Park would be scant. Four or five roads connecting the lakeshore with the state highway would take motorists to the lake. A road along the shore itself was also a possibility, but development was not pressing because of the convenient rail lines traversing the dunes. As for Park Service administration, a superintendent and two permanent rangers were all the personnel needed for visitor protection and interpretation with additional seasonal help during the summer. Estimated cost for the manpower would not exceed $15,000 a year. [13]

Mather declared that the Indiana Dunes were unmatched anywhere in the United States, if not the world. The area was convenient to five million people in the Chicago metropolitan area as well as millions of other Americans in the center of the nation. The principal segment of the proposed national park stretched from Miller to Michigan City, the northeast corner of Lake County to Porter County. Mather wrote:

The beauty of the trees and other plant life in their autumn garb, as I saw them recently, was beyond description.

Here is a stretch of unoccupied beach 25 miles in length, a broad, clean, safe beach, which in the summer months would furnish splendid bathing facilities for thousands of people at the same instant. Fishing in Lake Michigan directly north of the dunes is said to be exceptionally good. There are hundreds of good camp sites on the beach and back in the dunes. [14]

Mather discounted the value of land near Gary for the park either because the dunes were less spectacular or the land was too near industrial areas. Mather discussed the unique values for which Yellowstone, Yosemite, Crater Lake, Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Mesa Verde, and Grand Canyon (at the time pending) merited national park status. The Sand Dunes of Indiana, Mather believed, deserved the same designation:

The sand dunes are admittedly wonderful, and they are inherently distinctive because they best illustrate the action of the wind on the sand accumulated from a great body of water. No national park or other Federal reservation offers this phenomenon for the pleasure and edification of the people, and no national park is as accessible. Furthermore, the dunes offer to the visitor extraordinary scenery, a large variety of plant life, magnificent bathing beaches, and splendid opportunities to camp and live in the wild country close to nature.

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. My judgment is clear, however, that their characteristics entitle the major portion of their area to consideration as a national park project. [15]

Because opponents were not present at the Mather hearing does not mean there was no serious opposition to the park proposal. The center of this opposition was in Porter County, Indiana. Led by the press, business and political leaders, and the Valparaiso Chamber of Commerce, the critics attacked the immense area under consideration and charged it would undermine the tax base of the region and permanently close the lakeshore to industry. Many believed U.S. Steel Corporation was the power behind the park movement because it wished to keep its competitors out. [16]

"First Save the Country, Then Save the Dunes," 1917-1919

On December 20, 1916, Mather submitted his report to Secretary Lane who approved the report and forwarded it to Congress in early 1917. To help promote the park cause, Stephen Mather used his own money to publish and distribute the report. Thereafter, the outlook appeared bleak. Senator Taggart, the champion of the dunes in Congress, left office following his electoral defeat. Another vocal champion, Stephen T. Mather, was silenced when he suffered a nervous breakdown in the spring of 1917 and could not lobby for the park. The crippling blow came on April 6 when national priorities inexorably changed as the United States entered World War I. With revenues targeted for the national defense, any Congressional expenditure for the establishment of a Sand Dunes National Park appeared doomed. The popular slogan "Save the Dunes!" became "First Save the Country, Then Save the Dunes!" [17]

Undaunted, the National Dunes Park Association and other preservation groups were determined to continue the save the dunes campaign. Supporters took the Prairie Club's annual outdoor festival concept and expanded it into a historical pageant called "The Dunes Under Four Flags." The dunes pageant would tie the area to American history while portraying the beauty of the duneland through dance, music, and poetry. The Dunes Pageant Association, incorporated in Chicago in February 1917, commissioned Thomas Wood Stevens, president of the American Pageant Association, to compose a pageant similar to his other successful shows in Newark and St. Louis. Memorial Day 1917 was the first performance at the Waverly Beach blowout—a natural amphitheatre amidst the sand dunes—in the present-day state park. It was rained out, but the following weekend, 25,000 people jammed into the area for an unforgettable pageant with 600 actors. It was capped by a stirring grand finale, singing the national anthem. [18]

The pageant enjoyed widespread publicity thanks to area women's clubs. Newsreels spread the event throughout the country. Petitions proliferated. Each member of Congress received a copy of the pageant brochure. One author contends the pageant spawned a civil religion and a formidable political constituency for saving the dunes by creating a "community united by mutual sympathy." [19]

As United States involvement in the war deepened, NDPA members acknowledged their inability to halt the despoiling of the dunes during the conflict. They vowed to renew the fight "the minute the war is over." [20] They kept the issue before the public, however, as witnessed by what one Chicago columnist wrote in 1918:

Unless the State of Indiana or the United States takes the matter in hand, commercial plants will crowd the entire lake frontage. The matter resolves itself into a decision of humanity. Shall the million[s] of mill workers be condemned to the slavery of labor without recreation in the big plants on the lake shore, or shall they be given the privilege of open-air spaces and pure air in which to renew strength and courage in their brief hours away from the mills? [21]

While the war ended in late 1918, the Sand Dunes National Park initiative floundered badly in 1919, faced by the post-war prosperity and the mounting opposition of politicians and business interests. [22] Evidence of this fatal NDPA pessimism can be seen in the May 15, 1919, meeting of the Chicago committee. The group conceded that a prolonged educational campaign was needed to convince Congress to "purchase" the national park. After that arduous process, there would be no dunes left to save. The group admitted the NDPA should drop the national park struggle and pursue administration of the Indiana Dunes by the State of Indiana itself. [23]

Establishment and Development of the Indiana Dunes State Park

In 1919, William P. Gleason, superintendent of the Gary Steel Works and president of the Gary Park Board, succeeded A. F. Knotts as NDPA president. Gleason convinced U.S. Steel to donate 116 acres of lakeshore near Miller Woods (first called Lake Front Park, later Marquette Park) which became the first tract of the Indiana Dunes to be reserved for the public good. [24]

This success was accompanied by a feature in National Geographic magazine which showed the intricate beauty of the pristine dunes, but warned: "under commercial occupancy the growth of centuries could be destroyed in a short time. It would be a catastrophe if this opportunity for preserving an incomparable breathing spot on Lake Michigan should be neglected." [25] In addition, the Chicago chapter of the General Federation of Woman's Clubs convinced the national organization to designate November as "Save the Dunes Month" with each chapter devoting one program to study the Sand Dunes National Park proposal. Their rallying call was "Women of the East, let us join together to secure the first National Park east of the Mississippi River! Women of the West, who realize the advantages of the preservation of Natural Scenery, help us to save the finest specimens of Dune formation in the world!" [26]

The movement away from Federal involvement accelerated nevertheless. Origins of Indiana's interest in establishing its own State Park System began in 1916, when an Indianapolis business leader and municipal reformer recommended the State establish its own park system. A member of the Indiana Historical Commission (IHC—overseer of the State centennial), Richard Lieber found himself chairman of the IHC's State Park Memorial Committee. By the end of the year, Lieber succeeded in raising private funds to purchase McCormick's Creek Canyon and Turkey Run which became Indiana's first state parks. Lieber also called for the acquisition of a portion of the Indiana Dunes for a state park. In 1919, the Indiana Legislature approved the formation of the Department of Conservation and Republican Governor James P. Goodrich appointed Lieber its first director. [27]

By late 1920 or early 1921, National Park Service Director Stephen Mather and Assistant Director Horace Albright were convinced the fight for establishment of the Sand Dunes National Park was fruitless. Combined with scant political support in Indiana, the new Federal administration of Warren G. Harding ushered in a new era of Republican conservatism which nixed the plan. No dunes park bill was introduced before Congress. More importantly, Mather and Albright no longer believed in the cause. With industry's relentless push on each end of the lakeshore, Indiana Dunes was "unacceptable for National Park status." Albright recalled, "Mr. 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." [28]

Mather abdicated saving the dunes to his friend Richard Lieber. Both men organized the first national meeting of state park employees in 1921. Two years later, they reassembled at Turkey Run State Park where the National Conference on State Parks formed with Mather the first president and Gary's Bess Sheehan (NDPA officer) its secretary. Indiana's park system was the model in the United States and its leader redoubled his efforts to add the Indiana Dunes to its fold. [29]

Lieber had the full cooperation of the preservation groups who favored Federal involvement, namely the National Dunes Park Association, Prairie Club of Chicago, and the Nature Study Club of Indiana. In January 1921, Governor James P. Goodrich left office, but not before he endorsed the Indiana Dunes State Park proposal. In his inaugural address, Governor Warren McCray likewise embraced the concept. McCray proposed that if Calumet interests could raise $1 million, he would ask the Legislature for matching funds. Senators Robert Moorhead and Charles Buchanan were sent to visit the dunes. Highly enthusiastic, Buchanan introduced a bill to establish the Indiana Dunes State Park.

In a 1921 speech to a duneland gathering of Hoosier newspaper editors, Lieber explained that nowhere else in the Midwest could the working class better relate to its American heritage. Lieber, a German immigrant, saw the dunes in the shadow of Chicago and Gary as a safety valve on the ever-boiling social melting pot. Reserving the beautiful dunes as parkland could only further the "Americanization" process. [30]

When the Gary chapter of the NDPA voted in 1922 to abandon the effort for a national park in favor of a smaller state park, the organization, except for some of its stalwart members, effectively died. Gloomily acknowledging the collapse of hopes for National Park Service involvement and the Indiana Legislature's reluctance to act on the state park bill, Lieber declared in his 1922 annual report that it was now "the privilege and duty of Indiana, with private assistance, to preserve this heritage and God-given spot." [31] Lieber proposed purchasing 2,000 acres along three miles of lakeshore. To finance the venture, he called for a two mill tax increase on each $100 of personal property over seven years.

To assist Lieber's campaign, a new champion emerged to save the dunes: Bess Sheehan, NDPA secretary. Sheehan was also the energetic head of the Dunes Park Committee of the Indiana Federation of Women's Clubs which represented 600 units. With this powerful lobby group behind her, Sheehan personally took the issue directly to each legislator. The capstone was a January 26, 1923, stereopticon lecture before a special joint evening session of the Legislature to which the solons' wives were invited. Sheehan spoke for two hours, eloquently presenting the argument and showing the beauty of the area. The effort paid off. On the last day of the session, the senate passed the bill with some help from former U.S. Senator Thomas Taggart. In a letter, Bess Sheehan confided her previously hidden apprehension to her friend, Catharinne Mitchell:

The people here [NDPA Gary chapter members] all gave up the struggle; seemed I was the only one who stuck. Had I known how discouraged the others were I guess I would have given up too. I only began to sense it about the time I began to dare to hope for success, and that was the eleventh hour. [32]

On March 6, 1923, Republican Governor Warren McCray signed the bill authorizing the Indiana Dunes State Park. A new battle, however, was about to begin. The Indiana Dunes had changed considerably since Stephen Mather issued his national park proposal in 1916. The Dunes Highway, or U.S. Highway 12, now provided Chicago motorists fast, easy access to the area. The new roadway, agitation over which segment of lakeshore the State intended to purchase for the park, and the platting of two resort communities (Dune Acres and Ogden Dunes) caused land speculation to escalate. Land prices skyrocketed as real estate interests acquired large tracts of land.

With the prices escalating, Lieber realized it would require more time to raise enough funds for the park. Compounding the problem, no Indiana tax money could be used until the two mill assessment expired in 1930. To save the dunes from complete commercial exploitation, Lieber could not wait that long. He and Bess Sheehan began an ambitious fund raising drive which concentrated on wealthy Calumet citizens and industrialists. Indiana schoolchildren also sent in their pennies, but for the next two years, the results were disappointing.

Lieber broke the stalemate when he invited Indiana's new Republican governor, Edward Jackson, on a dunes tour in May 1925. Jackson was so impressed by what he saw and by Lieber's plea that the area might soon be lost that the governor authorized the Dunes Purchasing Board (a division of the State Conservation Commission) to expend some of the $200,000 in tax revenue to purchase 500 acres of duneland. Both Lieber and Jackson hoped this action would induce the Calumet's entrepeneurs to take notice of Indiana's determination to establish the new park. On August 29, 1925, Mount Tom, 110 acres owned by John O. Bowers (a Gary attorney), became the first tract acquired. Bowers sold at half the market value to set a precedent. The same month, the boundaries of the new park were announced. This act was followed in early 1926 by a generous $250,000 donation from U.S. Steel's Judge Elbert H. Gary. Sears and Roebuck president Julius Rosenwald gave $50,000. [33]

On July 1, 1926, four years ahead of original plans, the Indiana Dunes State Park opened to the public. In the first three months, nearly 63,000 people came. In tribute to the man who first placed the save the dunes issue before the American people a decade before, Richard Lieber erected a bronze plaque of Stephen Mather on a stone memorial in the center of the new park. [34] Reflecting on their long struggle, Bess Sheehan, in a letter to Lieber, declared the Federal park effort had not failed, but simply took a new form:

What did happen, as I have analyzed it, was, that the encouragement and interest then gathering momentum in state officials, state organizations and a few Indiana men and women of vision, induced the Indiana leaders to believe that it would be easier and quicker to create a state park, than a federal, and with the rapidly encroaching civilization, time was very precious. I should therefore prefer this statement to convey the thought that the encouragement forthcoming from Indiana people was the determining factor in the change from the federal to the state park idea. [35]

Modest physical development of the state park took place rapidly following opening day. State workers enlarged the existing parking lot at Waverly Beach to an 850-car capacity and Fort Creek in this vicinity was channeled into a culvert. Nearby Duneside Inn, a converted farmhouse, was fashioned into a tourist hotel. By far the greatest development was the pavilion. Completed in the fall of 1929, the limestone structure included a bathhouse on the second level and a restaurant and store (to service tourists and area cottagers) on the lower level. A fire lookout tower stood at the summit of Mount Jackson as did the "State Cottage," a summer home for Indiana's governors. A campground was available to the public as were a series of trails which linked the three "mountains" of the park—Mts. Tom, Holden, and Jackson—collectively called "Tremont."

Roads were scarce in the park area. Two were in the vicinity, but only one connected to the park. Constructed in 1931, the main entrance from Highway 12 was six-tenths of a mile long amidst a 500-foot wide right-of-way donated by Samuel Insull, Jr., owner of the Chicago, South Bend, and South Shore Railroad. [36]

Other development pressures necessitated the construction of Burns Ditch (1923-26). This large drainage canal which connected the Little Calumet River to Lake Michigan decimated much of the "Great Marsh" by drying the landscape out and permitting forestation of the area. [37]

Established and developed before the onset of the Great Depression, the 2,182-acre Indiana Dunes State Park was indeed a reality. Richard Lieber intended to keep it simple; the lakeshore would be developed in one area and the interior dunes kept as near pristine as possible, "serviceable [largely] for public welfare organizations; a place where we can bring the weary and hopeless ones, especially bring the little orphans into the sunlight." [38]