My townhouse in Miller Beach, on the eastern edge of Gary, Indiana, sits a block off the water. Walk that block north to Wells Street Beach, stand on the sand, and the whole argument is laid out in front of you. Look east, and the shoreline runs toward the Porter County dunes — the black oak savanna, the interdunal wetlands, and Cowles Bog, where American ecology was more or less invented. Turn west, and you see the stacks of Gary Works, the largest integrated steel mill in North America, once the largest in the world. My Papaw Hollis spent most of his working life there. So did my dad, until he was laid off during the consolidation of the 1980s.
Visitors and activists assume one of those things intrudes on the other. I think they have it backward. Both belong here, and the question is whether both can last here.
Roosevelt’s late arrival
Theodore Roosevelt did lend his name to these dunes. In May 1917, the National Dunes Park Association staged an enormous pageant on Waverly Beach — a thousand performers, tens of thousands of spectators — as unabashed propaganda for a proposed Sand Dunes National Park. Roosevelt sent a message of support, as J. Ronald Engel documents in Sacred Sands. So did the governors of Indiana and Illinois. It was eleven years too late for the western half of the shoreline.
J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel, chartered in 1901, began assembling land here in 1905. By the summer of 1906, teams of horses and mules were grading the dunes flat. The Grand Calumet River was rerouted, the wetlands were drained, and the town was named for the company’s chairman, Elbert Gary. In Duel for the Dunes, Kay Franklin and Norma Schaeffer put it plainly: in erecting Gary Works, U.S. Steel destroyed the Lake County dunes forever. All of that happened while Roosevelt was in the White House protecting land two thousand miles west.
The problem was more than inattention. At the height of the Panic of 1907, Elbert Gary and Henry Clay Frick came to the White House to ask whether the government would object if U.S. Steel absorbed the Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company, its largest southern competitor. Roosevelt said he could not advise it but would not stop it. Taft’s Justice Department sued over that transaction in 1911, and in 1920 the Supreme Court declined to break the company up, holding that size alone is no offense. Standard Oil and American Tobacco had both been dismembered in 1911. U.S. Steel became the largest American corporation to survive the trust-busting era intact. The man who broke Morgan’s railroad trust let his steel trust stand after it leveled the dunes.
That record is worth holding alongside Roosevelt’s own definition of the word, from The New Nationalism in 1910:
“Conservation does not mean nonuse or nondevelopment. It does not mean tying up the natural resources of the states. It means the utilization of those resources under such regulation and controls as will prevent waste, extravagance and monopoly, but at the same time, not merely promoting but encouraging such use and development as will serve the interests of the people generally.”
That is not a philosophy of locking places away. It is a philosophy of using them well. Applied to Northwest Indiana, it does not ask whether we should make steel on this shoreline. It asks how.
Civil society intervention
The dunes that survived are worth the answer, and the people who saved them did not work for the federal government. Henry Cowles was a University of Chicago botanist. His 1899 study of plant succession on these dunes essentially founded American plant ecology, and he wrote it about ground that is now bracketed by steel mills. Half a century later, in June 1952, Dorothy Buell gathered roughly two dozen neighbors — nearly all of them women — in her living room in Ogden Dunes and formed the Save the Dunes Council. No budget, no staff, and no standing.
They did not win everything. The port and the park were authorized in separate bills a year apart, and Congress deliberately tied them together: no appropriation for Burns Harbor until the dunes got a lakeshore. Coexistence here is not a recent idea. It is the founding legal architecture of the place. The Council could also outlast anyone. When NIPSCO tried to build a nuclear plant on the parcel between the lakeshore and Bethlehem Steel, the opposition held out until the project was abandoned in 1981, with $191 million spent and one percent built.
Indiana Dunes became a state park in 1926, a national lakeshore in 1966, and a national park in 2019. On roughly 15,000 acres, it supports approximately 1,100 native vascular plant species and thirty percent of Indiana’s listed rare, threatened, and endangered plants. The Park Service calls this ground the birthplace of American ecology. Arctic, Atlantic coastal, and Great Plains species grow within sight of a blast furnace.
A new era
Nippon Steel now owns U.S. Steel. As a condition of clearance, it signed a National Security Agreement and issued the federal government a golden share, which gives the President consent rights over any reduction in committed capital — roughly $11 billion through 2028, including about $3.1 billion for Gary Works. In a region that has watched capital leave for forty years, that is the largest commitment to Gary Works since the mill was built.
To date, the announced projects come to roughly $300 million to reline Blast Furnace No. 14 and about $200 million to upgrade the hot strip mill. Some of the remainder is ordinary sustaining capital that never gets a press release. No announcements have been made about the rest, and perhaps that is the good news.
A reline extends a furnace’s life by about two decades, so Gary will be making iron from metallurgical coke into the 2040s, and coke oven emissions are a known human carcinogen. My Papaw started at Gary Works around 1955 and worked fifteen years before the EPA existed. Because of their exposure to pollution, I knew men who didn’t get many years of retirement after decades in the mill.
Newer technology could change that arithmetic. Hydrogen injection displaces a meaningful share of the coke without abandoning the asset Nippon is about to rebuild, and the BP Whiting refinery, one of the largest industrial hydrogen operations in the Midwest, sits eight miles from the Gary Works gate.
The bigger opportunity for The Region is direct reduced iron (DRI), and U.S. Steel has already committed to it. In April, the board approved $1.9 billion for a DRI plant at Big River Steel in Osceola, Arkansas — the first in the country to be built alongside an operating mill and its electric arc furnaces. The case for bringing it to Gary is competitiveness before carbon. DRI runs on natural gas, which America produces in enormous volume and sells cheaply — the clearest structural advantage we hold over Chinese steel. With automakers already writing lower-emission steel into procurement terms, this seems like a natural play.
In the name of silicon and iron
In 1919, at a gathering of Jens Jensen’s Friends of Our Native Landscape at Lake Front Park in Gary, W. D. Richardson dedicated this landscape element by element: “In the name of silicon, the great earth builder. In the name of iron, maker of civilization.”
Consider when he said it. The Great Steel Strike had begun three weeks before. On October 4, a riot broke out on Broadway. Two days later, Governor Goodrich declared martial law, and Major General Leonard Wood arrived from Fort Sheridan with more than four thousand federal troops and banned public assembly on every street and in every park in the city. Wood had commanded the Rough Riders; Roosevelt had been his second, and had died that January.
Columbus Day fell six days after the troops came. Richardson stood in a Gary park under military occupation and consecrated this shoreline during the worst week this city ever had. He understood they were never two subjects.
The Antiquities Act of 1906 is what allowed Roosevelt to protect the Grand Canyon, but he couldn’t have done anything for The Region because the dunes had already been purchased by the industrialists of the time. Today, the capital is committed, and the government holds a share to keep it committed. What remains is the decision of what to buy. If Roosevelt were here today, I’d like to think he’d finish his map by supporting the coexistence and juxtaposition that is Sand and Steel.
Robert Ordway is a third-generation Northwest Indiana native and holds a MS in International Commerce & Policy from Valparaiso University. He writes on cultural and economic issues related to 20th century southern migration, deindustrialization, the Rust Belt and steel industry.
Very well-written article.