Marquette Park: Where Gliding Came Before the Wright Brothers

The dunes at what is now Marquette Park in Gary, Indiana, played a quiet but significant role in aviation history. In June eighteen ninety-six, engineer Octave Chanute came to the Miller Beach dunes and conducted more than seven hundred successful gliding flights from the sandy ridges above Lake Michigan. Chanute's glider designs and the data he gathered here were shared freely with two brothers in Dayton, Ohio, and his findings directly informed the Wright brothers' path to powered flight at Kitty Hawk in nineteen oh three. The park, which stretches along one and a half miles of Lake Michigan beach, also carries another thread of Gary's history: the city is the birthplace of the Jackson Five, who grew up in a two-bedroom house at twenty-three hundred Jackson Street across town.