Joseph Bailly Homestead

In eighteen twenty-two, a French-Canadian fur trader named Joseph Bailly established a trading post on the banks of the Little Calumet River, becoming one of the first non-Native settlers in what is now northwest Indiana. Bailly positioned himself shrewdly at the crossroads of ancient Indigenous trails, trading furs with the Native nations of the region and sending pelts east. He built a proper homestead here in eighteen thirty-four, just a year before his death, and the property remained in the family through his granddaughter until nineteen seventeen. Today the Bailly Homestead is one of the only surviving physical remnants of the Great Lakes fur trade era in this region, preserved inside Indiana Dunes National Park with its original log buildings, main house, and a family chapel still standing.