Marquette Park and the Dunes at Gary

Marquette Park sits on the Lake Michigan shore inside what is now Indiana Dunes National Park, just west of Gary. The park is named for the French Jesuit explorer Jacques Marquette, who is believed to have passed this shoreline in sixteen seventy-five on his final journey south. The dunes here drew a different kind of explorer in the early twentieth century: glider pilots.

The steep lakeside dunes became a training ground for pioneers of soaring flight, including Octave Chanute, whose glider experiments in the dunes near Miller Beach in eighteen ninety-six contributed directly to the Wright Brothers' success. Chanute documented his dunes work carefully and shared his findings freely, a practice Orville Wright later acknowledged as foundational. The park today is part of Indiana Dunes National Park, which began as a national lakeshore created by Congress in nineteen sixty-six and became a national park in twenty nineteen after one of the first major urban environmental campaigns in American history, led in part by Illinois Senator Paul Douglas.