Joseph Bailly Homestead: First Non-Native Settler on the Dunes

Joseph Bailly was a French-Canadian fur trader who arrived at the southern shore of Lake Michigan in eighteen twenty-two, making him the first known non-native settler of what is now the Indiana Dunes. He had worked the fur trade around Mackinac Island and married into the Odawa Nation before moving south. He set up a trading post in what would become the town of Porter, positioned at the crossroads of native and European trade routes along the lake.

In eighteen thirty-four he began building a more permanent homestead, a two-and-a-half-story house on the property. Bailly died in eighteen thirty-five, before the house was finished, and never lived in it. The National Park Service acquired the homestead in nineteen seventy-one.

The main house and outbuildings still stand among the dunes, among the oldest structures in what is now Indiana Dunes National Park.