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The Calumet Region:
Beyond the Highway
Clark and Pine Nature Preserve in Gary, Indiana.
Photo: Mike MacDonald/ChicagoNature.com
Few places in the United States weave life and landscape together as distinctively as the Calumet region does. What at first appears to be a one-dimensional industrial empire is, upon closer inspection, a remarkably textured world of ecological, economic, and human diversity.
The region is a crossroads. Northern forest, eastern hardwood, and Midwestern prairie join in a landscape of subtle variation. Native Americans, pioneer settlers, railroaders, and highway builders built paths that both picked their way through the region’s wetlands and soared above on commanding bridges. Millions gathered from around the globe to work and build community.
People walk or ride into the Calumet region through a number of different doors. Birders, hikers, canoeists. Clean air advocates and labor organizers. Entrepreneurs and historians. People in transit. People who have come to stay. People who want a look — beyond the highway.
A Wetland Region
Water in the Calumet region moves slowly, if at all, and pauses to form ponds, swamps, fens, bogs, and marshes — excellent home to an astonishing variety of plants and animals.
Pockets of People
The industrial Calumet features tightly packed population clusters near mills and factories along the lakefront and the railroads. The clusters are separated by quiet swathes of wetland and farm fields.
Industrial Powerhouse
Where rails met water, steel mills, oil refineries, auto and railcar plants, bulk materials handlers, and scores of factories developed. Dots show modern facilities reporting release of chemicals into land, water, air, and disposal facilities.
Landscape in Renewal
Volunteers and professionals work on open land to restore healthy ecosystems. (Efforts in progress are in dark green.) Elsewhere, brownfields programs bring former industrial lands back into productive use. (Projects, both underway and complete, in light green.)
The Green Infrastructure Vision
The Chicago Wilderness Green Infrastructure Vision is a blueprint for planning a region in which nature is accessible to all residents, and where the built environment sustains a healthy natural environment. The Vision is not all about land acquisition — it’s a call to think carefully about how people can live among natural areas in a way that benefits everyone (wildlife included), by using tools such as conservation development, conservation easements, and thoughtful land use planning. Visit the interactive version of this map.
Hammond Bird Sanctuary. Indiana
Photo: Susan Tabers, Hammond Marina
HIGHLIGHTED NATURAL AREAS
1 Hegewisch Marsh
The City of Chicago is restoring this 100-acre parcel, future home of the Ford Calumet Environmental Center.
2 Wolf Lake / Eggers Woods
A bi-state smorgasbord of picnic and play areas combined with rich nature found off the beaten path.
3 Seidner Dune and Swale Preserve
42-acre parcel with three ridges’ worth of rare “dune and swale” landscape.
4 Gibson Woods County Park
High-quality swell-and-swale plant communities on 178 acres, with a nature center.
5 Hoosier Prairie
816-acre remnant prairie with a short trail (only 3/4 mile) but a long list of native species.
6 Cowles Bog
Extensive wetland in Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore commemorates pioneering ecologist.
7 Sand Ridge Nature Center
Packs not only prairie, woods, wetlands, and beach ridge into 235 acres, but also history exhibits, gardens, and live animals.
8 Powderhorn Prairie & Marsh Forest Preserve
192 acres where volunteers gather each month to restore the high-quality “dune-and-swale” habitat.
9 Hammond Lakefront Bird Sanctuary
Known as the “Migrant Trap” for the large number of migrating birds that stop by on their way north and south.
10 Ivanhoe Dune & Swale
This 131-acre state nature preserve, hosts 69 butterfly species, including the endangered Karner blue.
11 Indiana Dunes State Park and Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore
Diverse in both species and landscape, offer beaches, awesome dune vistas, and quiet woods, prairie,and wetland.
Land and Life from the Air
The crossroads of the Calumet region is on full display in this 2003 Landsat satellite image.
A Pinhook Bog fills a depression left by a giant block of ice when glaciers piled up the range of hills, now forested and known as the Val-paraiso Moraine, more than 14,000 years ago.
B Sand Ridge Nature Center is clearly visible as a bead on the string of trees along Michigan City Road. It sits atop one of the three sand ridges left by receding Lake Michigan.
C Gary-Chicago Airport Just north of the airport, ancient sandy ridges alternate in a still visible washboard “dune-and-swale” pattern.
D The Little Calumet and Grand Calumet Rivers trapped between the sand ridges, meander through pancake flatness in search of Lake Michigan. They meet just south of O’Brien Lock and Dam.
E O’Brien Lock & Dam now serves as a continental divide. Water flows south and west to the Cal-Sag Channel or north through the Calumet River main stem, headed to the Great Lakes and Atlantic.
F Calumet-Sag Channel The Calumet region is connected to the Illinois Waterway and Mississippi River by this canal.
G U.S. Steel’s South Works began in 1880 at a site that is today cleared and awaiting redevelopment.
H Lake Calumet George Pullman built his factory and company town just west of here in 1882. Other manufacturers followed, attracting workers and their families from around the world.
I Inland Steel came to Lake Michigan in 1902, where it would eventually reshape the shoreline into a nearly two-mile-long peninsula.
J U.S. Steel built a new plant and the city of Gary in 1906 atop the former route of the Grand Calumet River.
K Bethlehem Steel came to Burns Harbor in 1967.
L West Beach Visitors can see the traces of past sand mining here. The struggle to protect the dunes from further encroachment led to the creation of the State Park in 1926 (M) and the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in 1966.
N Mt. Baldy is visible just west of Michigan City. A migrating sand dune, it moves about four feet to the southeast each year.
O Dunes Learning Center From its forest clearing, this center opens the rich landscape to the next generation of Calumet leaders.
Cross-Section of the Region
Bedrock layers of Silurian dolomite, millions of years in the making, appear at Thornton Quarry and the aptly named Stony Island on Chicago’s South Side. Above the bedrock, the landscape testifies to the more recent activity of glaciation, as shown in this generalized profile. The mile-high glacier piled unsorted rubble, sand, and clay into long hills called moraines, which mark the glacier’s last advance. Melting ice formed an ancestral Lake Michigan, whose shoreline re-ceded in several distinct stages. The three most prominent are marked by three sandy beach ridges that rise gently above the otherwise flat, clay bottom of the ancestral lake.
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