Lake Station, Indiana: First Station in Lake County

Lake Station, Indiana has the distinction of hosting the very first train station in Lake County. In eighteen fifty-one the Michigan Central Railroad reached this point, making it the western terminus of the line and a critical transfer point for passengers and freight heading toward Chicago. A year later, in eighteen fifty-two, a developer named George Earle mapped and platted a town of roughly six thousand five hundred acres on the site.

The Michigan Central built a two-story depot, a park, and railroad shops around it. According to local oral history, Abraham Lincoln may have stopped at the Audubon Hotel here on more than one occasion. In nineteen oh eight the town reinvented itself as East Gary, hoping to attract workers and executives connected to the booming steel industry nearby.

That gamble did not pay off the way planners hoped, and by the nineteen seventies the city voted to reclaim its original name, Lake Station, to distance itself from Gary's difficult reputation. The city took back the Lake Station name in nineteen seventy-seven.