Book Description

The Calumet Region Historical Guide; Containing The Early History Of The Region As Well As The Contemporary Scene Within The Cities Of Gary, Hammond, East Chicago (Including Indiana Harbor), And Whiting. PREFACE This Guide is one of a series of guidebooks to states, cities, and metropolitan areas compiled by the Writers Program, Work Projects Administration. A special unit of field workers and editors under the supervision of the editorial staff of the State office of the Indiana Writers Project, for more than a year has been collecting, writing, and editing the material contained herein. Headquarters for the work has been the Gary Commercial CIub and Chamber of Commerce, Gary, Indiana. Fringing the southern tip of Lake Michigan in northwest Indiana is an arc of land about 16 miles long, and at most, ten miles wide. Within this arc is a grouping of four industrial cities Gary, Hamrnond, East Chicago including Indiana Harbor, and Whiting. The area, through local usage, is known as the Calumet Region. The term Calumet Region, as used in the title of this book, has been arbitrarily circumscribed to mean these four cities and their immediate environs. The term is not susceptible of precise definition. Popular usages vary in their geographical delimitation of the region. Thus there are some who hold it to embrace all the territory lying contiguous to the southerly shore of Lake Michigan from St. Joseph, on the eastern coast, to Waukegan, on the western, as far south as the basin of the Kankakee River. Others restrict it to the Lake Michigan litter01 from South Chicago included to and embracing Michigan City, with a southerly extension ro the Little Calurnet River, For the purpose of this guidebook it has been thought advisable to fix the western limit as the Illinois-Indiana State boundary, co-terminous with the western boundary of Hammond, and the eastern as the easterly line of the Indiana Dunes State Park. The southern line of the region has been set as the southernmost point in the city of Gaty, about ten miles from the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Numerous towns, hamlets, and points of interest are treated as environs. Because of its industrial and commercial eminence and the resultant wholly industrial cities, the Calumet Region dramatically illustrates the industrial age-the twentieth century. This region, within a few miles of the eastern city limits of Chicago, lay dormant during the nineteenth century waiting for electricity and the machine age to give ir life...