Miller Beach
Miller Beach is a neighborhood of Gary, Indiana on the southernmost shore of Lake Michigan. First settled in 1851, Miller Beach was originally an independent town. However, the "Town of Miller" was eventually annexed by the then flourishing city of Gary in 1918. Located in the northeastern corner of Lake County, Indiana, the former town is now known as "The Miller Beach Community." Miller Beach borders Lake Michigan to the north, Porter County to the east, and is largely surrounded by protected lands, including Indiana Dunes National Park. Miller Beach is also the closest beach/resort community to Chicago, and has been a popular vacation spot since the early 20th century. As of the 2000 US census, it had a population of 9,900.
Home to some of the world's most threatened ecosystems, Miller Beach contains a high proportion of legally protected land. Miller encompasses the westernmost part of Indiana Dunes National Park, which is part of the United States National Park system, and includes both the Miller Woods and Long Lake areas. Indiana Dunes' West Beach area lies immediately to the east of Miller Beach. The entire shoreline of Miller is public beachfront. Miller's large lakefront park, Marquette Park, is a national landmark containing architecturally significant and historic structures, two bronze sculptures and the location of early experiments in aviation which predate the Wright Brothers flights.
Less than an hour from downtown Chicago by car, Miller Beach has attracted Chicagoans as tourists and residents for more than a century. The most affluent area within the municipal boundaries of Gary, Miller Beach contains multiple business districts, including the Miller Beach Arts and Creative District, a robust civil society, and numerous public and charter schools. The community is within a mile of exits on four major interstates, and is also served by South Shore Line commuter trains. Having defied regional trends toward racial polarization and environmental degradation, Miller Beach exhibits extraordinary socioeconomic, racial and bio diversity. The community has been described as "an island of integration and natural beauty".
Geography
Miller Beach sits at Lake Michigan's southern tip, and at the northeastern tip of Lake County. The majority of Gary's lakefront is occupied by heavy industry, Miller Beach is the only residential area within Gary's municipal boundaries with unspoiled lake frontage. The shoreline of Miller is publicly owned either by the municipal or federal governments, and beachfront homes are separated from the lake by "an apron of dunes".Protected lands separate Miller Beach from most of its neighbors, except for the smaller Gary neighborhood of Aetna to the southwest. To the west, the Miller Woods area of Indiana Dunes National Park lies between Miller and U.S. Steel's Gary Works. To the east, Miller borders on the Park's West Beach area. To the southeast and south, the Little Calumet River corridor largely separates Miller from the cities of Portage and Lake Station. Although mostly in private hands, the land along the Little Calumet is largely protected from development by flood-control easements. In addition, a strip of National Park property separates Miller's northern and southern halves, making the northern half of Miller Beach one of four beachfront communities entirely surrounded by the National Park.
As a legacy of the cycles of expansion it has undergone since the 19th century, Miller Beach contains a number of distinct neighborhoods. Miller's traditional core, The Grandlake Historic District, between Lake Street and Grand Boulevard, is home to Miller's oldest homes and civil structures, many built during the period of Miller's political independence such as Miller Town Hall and Miller School. The northern part of Miller Beach is chiefly residential and surrounded entirely by national parkland. At the far northeast corner, along County Line Road, Miller's most expensive development, East Edge, rubs shoulders with the Miller Village apartment complex.
West of Miller's downtown is another multi-block apartment complex, Duneland Village, containing a small baseball park, the 3.47-acre Gibson Fields, home field of Miller Little League for generations. In the opposite direction, more than a mile to the east of downtown on the Dunes Highway, the isolated Inland Manor subdivision lies in the midst of Indiana Dunes National Park. All property in Inland Manor has been acquired by the US government to become part of the National Park, however many residents remain in their homes under reservation of use and occupancy agreements.
History
Early history
When Lake Michigan first entered recorded history in the early 1600s, the land at the lake's southern end was populated by the Miami people. By 1640, the Miami had been driven from the region by the Beaver Wars. The Potawatomi moved in from the north to replace them. The Potawatomi frequently came into the areas now within the Indiana Dunes National lakeshore to hunt, fish and gather food including wild rice. The Odawa people also hunted deer there in the winter.French missionary Father Jacques Marquette passed along the south shore of Lake Michigan in 1675, attempting to return to Canada after he had fallen gravely ill on the Mississippi River. According to local tradition, Marquette camped for a night at the mouth of the Grand Calumet River in present-day Marquette Park, shortly before his death.
As the United States expanded westward in the early 19th century, the Potawatomi were removed from Indiana through a series of treaties and forced removals in the 1820s and 1830s. Indian Boundary Road in Miller Beach marks the border of a tract ceded in one such treaty, the 1826 Treaty of Mississinewas, which used the southern end of Lake Michigan as the tract's southern limit. By 1836, the Potawatomi nation had been deprived of all of its lands throughout Indiana. Some Potawatomi, however, remained in the Miller Beach area as landowners, including Simon Pokagon, second chief of the Pokagon Band. Other Potawatomi continued to visit the region in the spring and summer into the late 19th century.
As white settlement spread across the Upper Midwest in the 19th century, many promoters and speculators sought to attract settlers and commercial development to the Calumet Region, but were defeated by the difficult terrain and lack of transportation. In 1833, an inn called the Bennett Tavern was built at the mouth of the Grand Calumet River, serving the Detroit-Chicago stagecoaches that ran along the shoreline. It stood for only a few years. The first man to plat a town in modern-day Miller Beach was Indian trader Joseph Bailly, who in 1833 platted a "Town of Bailly" at the mouth of the Grand Calumet, in present-day Marquette Park. But nothing came of the Town of Bailly or the "Indiana City" laid out nearby in 1837.
In 1837, the area that would become downtown Miller was purchased and platted by Indian traders William and George Ewing and George H. Walker. The plat bore the name of "Ewing's Subdivision", as the lots within it still do. Development in Ewing's Subdivision took off when the railroad arrived in 1851.
Town of Miller
With the coming of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railway in 1851, a train stop first called "Miller's Station" and later "Miller's Junction" or "Miller's", and ultimately "Miller", was established in the present-day downtown area of Miller Beach. A railroad town from its inception, Miller would later also be served by the B&O Railroad beginning in 1874 and the South Shore Line beginning in 1908. The person for whom the town was named is unknown. An early railroad agent recalled the name as coming from a construction engineer named John Miller who lived in the area, and at whose home the early trains would stop for water and wood between LaPorte and Chicago. Other possible namesakes include an innkeeper for whom train crews dropped off milk, and a foreman who buried his son nearby.Swedes began to migrate to the United States in large numbers in the 1860s as a result of the famines in Scandinavia, and some of these immigrants settled in Miller. The Swedish- and German-Americans of early Miller drew their livelihood from sand mining, ice harvesting, and railroad maintenance. Miller remained very small in this period; only twelve families were present in 1870. Miller acquired its first schoolhouse in the 1860s, and its own post office in 1879. Beginning in the 1880s, the town hosted a small commercial sturgeon and whitefish fishery, with fishermen bringing in sturgeon weighing as much as 200 pounds.
The combination of proximity to Chicago and a pristine natural environment soon drew visitors from the city. Among them was aviation pioneer Octave Chanute, who staged a series of experimental flights from the 70-foot dunes near Lake Street Beach in 1896. Around the same time, the pioneering botanist Henry Chandler Cowles conducted early studies of ecological succession in Miller Woods. In subsequent decades, the Chicago film industry used the Miller dunes and beaches as backdrops in numerous silent films set in exotic locales. Among these were films by the Selig Polyscope Company, and the Chicago Essanay Studios productions The Plum Tree and The Fall of Montezuma, in which the Miller beach represented the coast of Mexico.
Millerites rallied to incorporate their community as the Town of Miller in 1907, hoping to prevent annexation by Gary following the founding of that then booming city in 1906. Gary mayor Thomas Knotts first attempted to annex Miller in 1910 as part of a larger territorial dispute with East Chicago. According to the 1910 census, at that time the Town of Miller had a population of 638 people. This initial annexation effort was successfully resisted.
In the 1910s, the Gary city government and US Steel became increasingly aware of the need for a lakefront park for the millworkers and their families. In view of this, Miller and Gary formed a joint parks department in 1915 to administer part of the land that is now Marquette Park. Encountering difficulties purchasing this land, however, Gary sought to annex Miller so that it could seize the property by eminent domain. In 1918, the town board voted to accept annexation, ending Miller's political independence.