Munster, Indiana

The town of Munster traces its name to a Dutch immigrant's general store. Jacob Munster arrived in this corner of Lake County in eighteen seventy and opened a shop on Ridge Road, an ancient Potawatomi trail that once cut across the sandy lakeshore ridge. The store doubled as the community post office, and postal authorities simply named the station after the building it sat in: Munster.

For decades the settlement stayed quiet, supplying dairy and produce to Chicago markets just across the state line. In nineteen oh seven, seventy-six residents voted to formally incorporate the town, outvoting the twenty-eight who said no. Today Munster is a compact suburb of about twenty-four thousand, still anchored to that same ridge road Jacob Munster walked more than a century and a half ago.