Chesterton: Indiana's Dunes Gateway Town

Chesterton, Indiana, grew up beside the railroad in eighteen fifty-two, when the Lake Shore and Michigan Railroad came through and pulled the settlement north to its tracks. A cooperage, sawmills, and an organ factory followed. Then in nineteen oh-two, a fire destroyed most of the wooden downtown.

What replaced it was brick, two stories, and built to last. The thirteen buildings of the Chesterton Commercial Historic District, added to the National Register in nineteen ninety-nine, are mostly that nineteen-oh-two to nineteen-oh-five rebuild, a tidy catalog of small Midwestern commercial architecture from the era when Indiana's lake shore was a summer escape for Chicago.