Bailly Homestead: The Fur Trader at the Edge of the Dunes

Joseph Bailly arrived at the southern shore of Lake Michigan in eighteen twenty-two as one of the first permanent non-Indigenous settlers in what would become northwest Indiana. A French-Canadian fur trader who had worked the Great Lakes network from Montreal to Mackinac, Bailly chose this spot for a trading post. He had married into the Odawa Nation and understood the networks he was entering.

The homestead he built beginning in eighteen thirty-four is one of the few surviving traces of the fur trade in this region. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in nineteen sixty-two and is preserved by the National Park Service within Indiana Dunes National Park.