The State Line Generating Station

Jerry Banik
December 2020 

The State Line Generating Station was an engineering and architectural marvel, supplying the electricity needed for the Commonwealth Edison and Northern Indiana Public Service systems to power the businesses, farms and homes of millions of people in Northwest Indiana and Northern Illinois. For twenty-five of its eighty-three years it was the largest electric generating station in the world. It towered above the Lake Michigan shoreline, with its 250-foot tall smokestacks dominating the view of the lakefront from Calumet Park to Indiana Harbor.

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Samuel Insull, who is acknowledged as the designer and builder of much of America’s modern power grid, arranged for the money, estimated at more than four-and-a-half million dollars, needed to create the generating station. Insull was the CEO of the Commonwealth Edison Company, having worked with Thomas Edison since the age of twenty-one.  In 1921 he owned all five of the major power companies that supplied the Chicago area.  The South Shore Railroad was also among the many other businesses he either owned or founded.

Thomas Edison himself oversaw the design of State Line’s generators.  When it came online in 1929 the plant’s capacity was five to ten times greater than the largest generating stations of its day.  Its long range plans and design called for three future, major expansions, and they were carried out in the 1930s, 1950s and 1960s.  It’s not surprising that, with a pedigree like that, State Line was designated a National Historic Mechanical Engineering Landmark in 1977.

The site for the plant was selected because of its proximity to both Chicago and to the Calumet Region’s heavy industries, its many railroads, and Lake Michigan’s water supply.  Like Roby’s nearby race track once did, State Line sat adjacent to the Indiana/Illinois line, but was in the lake, on 90 acres of man-made peninsula within the city limits of Hammond.

Construction of a breakwater to create the peninsula began in May of 1925.  The breakwater was backfilled and the peninsula was complete in October, 1926.  Then, in order to support the plant’s heavy machinery, steel caissons were sunk through the fill and sand, down to the solid rock of the lake bed.

The plant was up and running in 1929, and lasted until being permanently shut down in 2012. When it was about to be demolished, the Southeast Chicago Historical Society salvaged boxes of corporate publications and old, black and white photographs, some of which are shown below. From left to right they show construction of the breakwater for the peninsula, excavation for a discharge tunnel above which the boiler house would be built, installation of a precast concrete discharge tunnel, and an early aerial view of the completed station.

State Line can be considered one of the most handsome power plants ever built.  Relatively few people ever got to see it up close, where the art deco style architecture of its buildings could be appreciated.  Unlike most heavy-industrial structures, its buildings were pleasing to the eye.  They were designed by architects of the firm of Graham, Anderson, Probst & White, which designed some of Chicago’s famous buildings, including the Wrigley Building, the Field Museum, the Shedd Aquarium and the Merchandise Mart. 

The State Line facility included a combination grand entry gate and guardhouse, which thankfully was spared from demolition after operations ceased. The top of the gate’s facade can be seen here, although the letters of the plant’s name that sat atop it have disappeared.

The entrance to the hall that contained the station’s turbines featured detailed, patterned brickwork above a large, arched, opaque glass window. Stone carved lettering, spelling out the plant’s name, adorned the top. 

Seen from the inside, forged iron trusswork, fabricated at local mills, supported the arched window. The window, along with tinted glass skylights that ran the length of the hall’s roof, provided the hall with plenty of light.

Even the steel beams that supported the overhead crane were accented with ornate metalwork.

Commonwealth Edison had a custom herald designed specifically for this plant.  It appeared throughout the offices and the control room, and in limestone carvings on the walls.

Coal was the fuel used to fire the plant’s boiler units, which created the steam to run its turbines.  Coal was the lifeblood of State Line, and ultimately the leading cause of its demise.  It was hauled to the plant by trains that were often more than a mile long.  Many locals trying to drive in and out of Whiting Park can attest to trains of that length as they patiently waited to cross the tracks. 

When the loaded coal cars, called gondolas, arrived they were staged on sidings.  Then electric locomotives positioned them on a ramp roughly a hundred yards long, leading up to a rotary dumper.  

Between the track rails on the ramp was an inner set of rails.  On it ran a device called a mule.  The mule was hauled by a cable that was operated by an electric motor in a pit below the ramp.

The mule emerged from the pit on the inner rails, and pushed the gondola up the ramp.  When the gondola reached the dumper, it pushed off the empty gondola already there from the previous haul. 

While the empty gondola ahead rolled back down to the railroad sidings, the dumper turned the new gondola full of coal upside down, emptying it.  Meanwhile, the mule dropped back down into the pit below the tracks and returned to the bottom of the ramp, ready to push up the next car.  This system allowed about twenty coal cars per hour to be run up from the sidings to the dumper.

From the dumper, the coal fell into a large hopper. The hopper fed it onto a conveyer belt that carried it to the breaker house, seen here.  There the coal was broken up by a battery of rotating drums, each of which was capable of breaking 250 tons of coal an hour.  The plant’s storage pile of coal was huge.  Enough coal was stockpiled on site to run the plant for 100 days, in case of unforeseen disruptions in supply.

Unfortunately for Samuel Insull, his fortunes were ruined by the stock market crash and the Great Depression that followed almost immediately after the station was completed.  Some of his financial dealings, like his use of highly leveraged junk bonds, ended up getting him indicted for fraud.  He was acquitted but was forced to leave ComEd, bankrupt, and with his reputation destroyed.  State Line survived, though, and remained online.

The plant’s operations had been grandfathered against clean air regulations that began in earnest in the 1970s, and it was not fitted with the type of the pollution control equipment that was mandated on newer, more modern generating plants.

In 1997 ComEd sold State Line to the Mirant Corporation, and just five years later, Mirant sold it to Dominion Resources.

Then, in 2011, the Environmental Protection Agency enacted what was called the Clean Air Transport Rule.  It required drastic reductions in certain emissions if the winds could carry them across state lines, and, most importantly, it ended the plant’s grandfather status.  Dominion Resources determined it wasn’t economically feasible to spend the millions of dollars needed for new pollution controls to get the plant into compliance with the new rule.  It was permanently shut down in March of 2012.

It took two years to demolish and haul away State Line’s buildings and equipment.  With the closing of the plant Hammond lost its single biggest taxpayer.  The city tried but failed to entice Amazon.com, Inc. to build a second world headquarters on the site.  In 2018 a group of developers announced plans to build a data center, to be known as Digital Crossroad, on the vacant peninsula, providing server space for national companies and major institutions.