Chesterton Commercial Historic District

Chesterton, in Porter County Indiana just south of the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, grew as a railroad town after the railroad came through in eighteen fifty-two. The place began as Coffee Creek in eighteen thirty-three, was renamed Calumet in eighteen fifty, and was platted in eighteen fifty-two. It took the name Chesterton in eighteen seventy, drawn from Westchester Township, and was reincorporated as a town in eighteen ninety-nine.

The community that built up around the depot developed a main street commercial district in the Italianate brick style common to Midwest railroad towns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, brick storefronts designed to project prosperity and permanence. Chesterton served the farms and small industries of Porter County and also, by the early twentieth century, the summer cottagers who came from Chicago to the Indiana Dunes on the South Shore Line. The Chesterton Commercial Historic District preserves this streetscape on the National Register of Historic Places, a document of the particular economic moment when rail access to Chicago markets could turn a crossroads into a small-city commercial center.

Today Chesterton's downtown retains much of its original brick fabric and is a downtown of shops and galleries serving visitors to the Indiana Dunes National Park. The South Shore Line is headquartered in Chesterton, and its Dune Park station sits just north of town.