What Was Here Before: Gary, Indiana

Before the smokestacks, this was one of the most striking landscapes in the Midwest. The Miami and then the Potawatomi lived among the Indiana dunes for centuries, hunting the forests behind the sand ridges and fishing Lake Michigan. Treaties in the eighteen twenties and thirties stripped them of these lands, and the Potawatomi were forced out entirely by the eighteen thirties.

For decades the dunes sat largely untouched. Then in nineteen oh five, United States Steel bought nine thousand acres along seven miles of Lake Michigan shoreline. Engineers drained wetlands, leveled sand dunes, and rerouted a river to make way for what became the largest steel plant in the world. They named the instant city after Elbert H. Gary, the corporation's chairman, who had little lasting connection to the place. Workers poured in from across Europe and the American South. By nineteen twenty the city held fifty-five thousand people where a decade before there had been almost no one. Gary became the archetype of the industrial American boomtown, and then, as the steel economy collapsed, of the American post-industrial city left behind.