Portage, Indiana: Prairie to Steel in One Generation

Long before Portage, Indiana became a city, this stretch of southern Lake Michigan shoreline was called Twenty Mile Prairie, denoting its distance from Michigan City along the old stagecoach road linking Detroit and Fort Dearborn. The Potawatomi had a main settlement here in the early eighteen hundreds. Portage Township was organized in eighteen thirty-five, but the land remained mostly rural for well over a century.

The transformation came fast. In nineteen fifty-nine, National Steel opened a plant on the Lake Michigan shore here, bringing sixteen hundred jobs. By nineteen sixty-three, Bethlehem Steel was building a second facility nearby, eventually employing six thousand more.

Portage incorporated as a town in nineteen fifty-nine, the same year the first steel poured, and became a city in nineteen sixty-seven. The Indiana Dunes National Park now preserves the sandy shoreline just to the east, so today the city that grew up beside heavy industry also sits at the edge of one of the most biodiverse temperate shorelines in the country.