Whiting: A Land of Natural Beauty
John Hmurovic
November 2023
It’s hard to imagine now, but at one time Whiting-Robertsdale was one of the most beautiful spots along the Great Lakes. It was teeming with wildlife, especially ducks, geese, and other waterfowl, far more than are here today. This area was a mix of water and sand. On the sand grew bushes, filled with berries. They were everywhere and attracted a wide variety of birds. Wildflowers also blossomed in abundance. It was a land of great, natural beauty.
The land that formed the shoreline directly adjacent to Lake Michigan was flat, much as it is today, but wider than today’s beach. Beyond the lakefront, into what is today’s city, there were a series of sand ridges. Viewed from above, they would have looked corrugated, much like corrugated cardboard, with one ridge after another, after another, after another, and so on. In between each of those sandy ridges was water. It’s likely that those ridges and swales covered almost all of what is now Whiting and much of today’s Robertsdale.
This is an image from an Indiana Department of Natural Resouces poster that shows the kind of dunes and swale landscape that covered Whiting and Robertsdale before the arrival of the oil refinery in 1889. The dunes are actually small sand ridges covered with vegetation. There were a series of those ridges, and in-between each one was a swale, a body of water. These ridges and swales teemed with birds and other creatures, while a wide variety of flowers, trees, and bushes covered the ground. It was beautiful, but travel through this land was nearly impossible, which explains why this corner of Indiana was the last part of the state to be settled.
One way we know the dunes and swales were extensive was because no one wanted to live in this area. To walk to Lake Michigan from the south, you had to climb over a dune, slog through a small body of water, climb another dune, go through more water, climb another dune, and on and on. It would have been exhausting. There was a reason why this corner of Indiana was the very last part of the state to be settled, and that was it.
Sand fleas were not just a Whiting annoyance. People all along the southern coast of Lake Michigan, including early settlers of East Chicago and Gary, complained about the annoying little creatures.
Over the centuries after the dunes and swales formed, vegetation grew on the dunes. Flowers, trees, and numerous bushes filled with berries. Henry Theobold was an early settler. He said wild grapes were everywhere. “We would go out and pick them. One winter we picked 75 gallons.” The vegetation, water, and absence of people attracted birds and waterfowl, as well as numerous small animals and thousands of frogs. “We could almost dance to the concert the frogs and crickets broadcast from the swamps,” Theobold said.
As beautiful as the land was, it was not attractive for living. Millions of sand fleas made their home here. The swampy conditions also attracted snakes. Emma Thamm, an early settler, loved the beauty of the area, but, she said, “There were always lots of snakes around here.” She said they were especially numerous around the many bushes where berries grew.
There was once a series of five lakes at the southern end of Lake Michigan. Lake Calumet and Hyde Lake are in the city of Chicago. The state line runs through Wolf Lake, but all of George Lake is in Robertsdale. Berry Lake, however, no longer exists, and hasn’t for a century. It is on the far right on this map. It was mostly in Whiting, but its southern tip was in East Chicago. Standard Oil drained it because more land was needed for its refinery. But prior to the arrival of the refinery Berry Lake was considered to be one of the most beautiful spots in the area. On its northern edge was the Berry inn, home of Hannah Berry and her family, the first settlers of European heritage to live in what is now Whiting.
Berries were also abundant at Berry Lake, which was also lined with numerous, tall, white, birch trees. The lake was considered by early pioneers as one of the most beautiful spots in a beautiful area. “Berry Lake was Eden-like,” wrote local historian Archibald McKinlay, “full of fish and water lilies, its banks lush with berries, especially raspberries, and luxuriant with woods, topped at the lake’s northern end by birches that stood like sentinels guarding a magic place.” The lake was located at the northern edge of today’s Marktown and extended north into what is the industrial northeast corner of what is now Whiting.
There is no evidence that Native Americans lived here, but they almost certainly visited to hunt and fish. They also used the flat beachfront as a trail. In 1803, white men of European heritage were known to have come through this area for the first time, although French trappers were active in the general area and were probably here before them. In 1803, though, the white men who passed through were American soldiers from Fort Detroit. They were on their way to the mouth of the Chicago River to build Fort Dearborn. To get there, they used the flat, lakefront trail that ran across Whiting and Robertsdale.
Today’s Indiana and Illinois were already a part of the United States in 1803, but in that year the United States bought from France 826,000 square miles of land in what was known as the Louisiana Purchase. The land reached from modern day Louisiana to Montana. It opened a new frontier for the United States. Fort Dearborn was built to start a westward push into the newly purchased land. It was the edge of the frontier in 1803. There was no other U.S. outpost further west.
The new fort brought added travel along the Whiting-Robertsdale lakefront, but people from the east were still reluctant to come west out of fear. Native Americans, led by warriors like Tecumseh, rebelled against the intrusion of invaders onto their lands, and those rebellions held back settlers of European heritage. The situation remained unsettled as British and American troops clashed in the War of 1812 and the original Fort Dearborn was burned to the ground.
Fort Dearborn was an important part of the story about how Chicago became a major city, but its founding was also the first time that Whiting played what became a familiar role: A place people passed through to get to Chicago. To build Fort Dearborn, soldiers from Detroit had to pass through what later became Whiting to get there. Passing through Whiting and Robertsdale to get to the big city to the west is still a part of who we are.
But by 1830, the United States had things under control and in that year the Indian Removal Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Andrew Jackson. The law gave the President the power to remove Native Americans from their land, peacefully if they cooperated but by force if they didn’t, to lands west of the Mississippi River.
Once Native Americans were forced out, white settlers flocked to Indiana and Illinois. Before the act was signed in 1830, there were only 250 people in what is now Chicago. By 1833, Chicago became a city, and its population swelled to 4,500 by 1840.
But settlers were still not willing to live on the dunes and swales of far northwestern Indiana. It wasn’t until 1834 that Whiting-Robertsdale had its first white settlers. They were the Berry family. We don’t know how many were in the family, but we do know they built a log cabin inn on the shores of Berry Lake. The lake, by the way, was named after the Berry family, not for the abundant berries that grew near it.
The only person we know in the Berry family was Hannah Berry. We know her because she operated the inn that her family built. Hannah’s inn was located on the Fort Dearborn-Detroit road, the lakefront beach trail that ran through here. As westward expansion grew, our section of beach continued to be the main route from the east in the 1830s and 1840s. Stagecoaches ran along Whiting and Robertsdale’s lakefront, mostly carrying passengers west to Chicago. Some historians say they ran along this route three times a week.
The dotted line shows the lake shore trail that travelers used to get between Detroit and Chicago. It passed through southern Michigan and then along the lake, including through Whiting-Robertsdale, before getting to Fort Dearborn/Chicago.
It was also the main route for carrying mail to and from the east. Typically, two soldiers would bring the mail, carrying it in knapsacks as they dashed along the route between Detroit and Chicago. Hannah’s inn provided a place for the travelers to stop for the night, for a drink, or for a meal. One account said that Hannah was a good cook, but we know nothing else about her or her inn. Inns along this route did not have a good reputation. One British traveler said pigs had better accommodations, but we don’t know how Hannah’s rated.
As anyone from Whiting-Robertsdale knows, sometimes the sandy beach can be difficult to walk on, but in winter the surface gets hard and easy to travel. The changing condition of the sand did not make the lakefront trail a reliable route for stagecoaches and other forms of transportation. It was, however, one of the few options. But in 1852 everything changed. That’s when the first railroad track was laid in Whiting-Robertsdale, adjacent to the lakefront trail. The Michigan Southern track was part of the first rail line to connect Chicago to the east. Once that happened, Chicago’s population zoomed. It went from 30,000 in 1850, to 112,000 in 1860. The beachfront trail was no longer a good option, and it was quickly abandoned by travelers. The arrival of trains put Hannah’s inn out of business.
The Michigan Southern Railway was the first railroad to come through Whiting. It later became the Lake Shore Railway, and later it became a part of the New York Central system.
Hannah’s inn was located in the extreme northeastern corner of today’s Whiting city limits. The area today is highly industrial, just a little north and west of Marktown. The next group of settlers made their home a little further west. They located near today’s intersection of Front Street and the railroad tracks. These settlers were section hands for the newly constructed railroad. Their job was to keep the tracks maintained in this area. The railroad picked this spot for them in the 1850s, but by 1868 it was still a small community. Besides the section hands, others made a living selling blocks of ice they cut from Berry Lake to buyers in Chicago. Still, the settlement was less than 100 strong when it became known as Whiting. The sleepy little settlement didn’t grow much in the decades that followed. It was still an uninviting, but beautiful area. Then, in 1889, a major change came.
That was the year Standard Oil chose this site as the location of their new refinery, the world’s largest at the time. The company leveled the dunes and drained the swales. It also ripped out the birch trees that grew in abundance along Berry Lake. “The birch was about the most attractive tree in Whiting twenty years ago,” said a writer in the Whiting Sun newspaper in 1906. “It helped make Berry Lake a beauty spot which is still cherished in the memory of the older inhabitants.” Standard filled in Berry Lake, wiping it off the map by 1927.
Workers were needed for the new refinery. The first newcomers complained about the sand fleas: “Whiting’s pest, the sand flea, is almost unbearable this year,” the newspaper reported in the early 1890s. They complained about the sand: “There were awful many sand hills on John Street,” said Hannah Falkenthal. “There were no sidewalks or streets,” said Lena Vogel, who got here in 1891. “We waded in sand up to our knees.” But they still praised the beauty of the area: “There were all kinds of woods and birds, and the whole place was so pretty,” said Emma Thamm.
Gradually, the problems nature created vanished as the refinery grew and more ridges were leveled and more swales were drained. With them went most of the waterfowl and birds, the frogs and the fish, as pollution from the refinery ran uncontrolled. Eventually, no one was around who could remember that at one time this was a stunningly beautiful place. By the 1920s, young people would laugh at such a suggestion.