Efforts to save the dunes are as old as the earliest attempts to destroy them; and interestingly, even the first steps to ensure preservation were the result of citizen initiative and grass roots action.
The battle began when improved transportation radiating out from the fastgrowing city of Chicago made the south shore of Lake Michigan accessible simultaneously to scientists, nature lovers, and conunuters to factory jobs.

Early Efforts
Friends of the Native Landscape, the Prairie Club, and others who participated regularly in "Saturday walks" at the dunes recognized the need for some formal public claim on the land as a counter-force to industrial expansion soon after U.S. Steel flattened the westernmost dunes to build its harbor, steelmaking complex, and instant company town.

Among the influential leaders whom they persuaded to join their cause was a Chicago industrialist named Stephen Mather who was to become the first director of the National Park Service. Mather proposed a 12,000-acre Sand Dunes National Park as early as 1916. His initial efforts to persuade Congress of the merits of this plan were unsuccessful, and World War I delayed action still further. The seeds of the idea were firmly planted, nonetheless, and would eventually bear fruit.

State Park Established
Local activists turned next to the state for help, and landscape architect Jens Jensen from Friends of the Native Landscape brought Richard Lieber, first director of the new Indiana Department of Conservation, up for a visit. Lieber was impressed; aided by letters from the involved citizens to influential state politicians, he was able to win authorization for a 2,182-acre Indiana Dunes State Park.

The next obstacle-one that would be encountered again many years later with the National Lakeshore -was the discovery that authorization for a park did not automatically include the appropriation of money to buy it. Use of tax money for such purposes was not yet accepted policy, so the local citizens were called into action again. Bess Sheehan of the Indiana Federation of Women's Clubs organized thousands of small donors, including schoolchildren who sent in their pennies, to match corporate donations from such firms as U.S. Steel and Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Finally, on July 1, 1926, the park opened its gates. Almost 63,000 visitors came in the first three months.

Save the Dunes Council Born
The popularity of the dunes continued to grow in the decades that followed. They seemed in danger of being loved to death, in fact, as residential development augmented industrial expansion. No further public parklands were acquired, however, until the Save the Dunes Council set to work on the problem.
The group was started by Dorothy Buell and about a dozen other women who met for the first time in the living room of her home in Ogden Dunes on a late summer day in 1952.

The immediate focus of their concern was a 3,500-acre pristine tract of wild, high dunes, lakes, interdunal ponds, wetlands and forests which extended from Ogden Dunes east to Dune Acres and from the lake south to U.S. Highway 12. The Council would eventually lose that first battle; the tract that was their first choice for a new park was leveled to make way for a Bethlehem Steel Plant, a Northern Indiana Public Service Company generator, and the Port of Indiana. But they won the war all the same, prevailing eventually over some of the most powerful forces in the country in a historic conservation confrontation that would last for decades and become a classic of its kind.

Events and experience were to shape the Save the Dunes Council from its innocent and unsophisticated beginnings to become a politically involved, skillful, knowing group.

Events and experience over that period were to shape the Save the Dunes Council from its innocent and unsophisticated beginnings to become a politically involved, skillful, knowing group. Persistence would also play a role in their success; they not only marshalled political and public support to establish a national park but made a prescient decision not to disband once that goal was achieved. In the almost 20 years since, they have managed to sustain their credibility and effectiveness as simultaneous protector, friend, and chief critic of that park.

Finding a Way
The newly formed Council thought at first that it could raise money to buy the land, but it quickly became apparent that this was not practical. They explored the possibility of adding lands to the Indiana Dunes State Park, but the state of Indiana was becoming increasingly committed by that time to industrialization of the dunes and to a harbor at Burns Ditch. As a last resort, they returned to Stephen Mather's original proposal of a Sand Dunes National Park and asked Indiana's senators Homer Capehart and Albert Jenner to introduce a bill; the senators, too, turned them down.

Donald Culross Peattie, the naturalist, suggested to Dorothy Buell at that point that she approach Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois for help. He had spent summers in the dunes and loved the area. After determining that the Indiana congressional delegation was indeed not interested in sponsoring the cause themselves and after becoming convinced that the dunes were being imminently threatened Douglas reluctantly took on the project and became its fervid and staunch champion. Without his support and guidance, the present Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore would undoubtedly also be under concrete.

The First National Park Bill
In 1958, he introduced the first bill to establish an Indiana Dunes National Monument to preserve the 3,500 prized acres between Ogden Dunes and Dune Acres. It stood not the smallest chance of passing. Bethlehem Steel had, in fact, already been quietly buying up lots in the contested area, and during a particular Senate hearing with 60 Save the Dunes Council members in the hearing room and the walls lined with Frank Dudley's dunes paintings which they had brought with them on the bus, they heard that bulldozers were leveling the beautiful land they were seeking to preserve.

It was the low point of the struggle and a point at which the Council seriously considered giving up on the whole thing. They decided, instead, to fight harder and to save as much unspoiled land as they could-in big and little pieces-along the whole 15-mile shore.

The Fine Art of Compromise
Douglas set to work on a compromise the opposition couldn't refuse. The state of Indiana had won its battle for a deep-water port near Burns Ditch, but it still needed $25 million in federal funds to build the harbor's outer breakwater. Douglas lined up enough votes to block the funds unless a vote was also taken on park authorization.

The battle raged. Was the issue 'picnics versus paychecks?' Should they 'steel more of the dunes?' Support from the steelworkers' union in the preservationist coalition strengthened its cause and helped bring new Indiana Senators Birch Bayh and Vance Hartke as well as Congressman Ray Madden over to their side.

Spreading the Word
The Council also took its cause to the national press, generating stories and editorial support from dozens of major papers coast to coast; they gathered 250,000 signatures on Save the Dunes petitions; they made a film and showed it to everyone anywhere who would sit still long enough to watch it; they made personal visits to all 435 House members and all 100 senators. They taught themselves lobbying skills, how to prepare testimony, learned the importance of congressional committee staffs, and the intricacies of the legislative procedure.

1966 - Lakeshore Established
Finally, late in 1966, Congress authorized an Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore to protect eight miles of shoreline and 5,300 acres exclusive of the Indiana Dunes State Park. The state park was declared within the National Lakeshore boundaries but could be acquired only if the state wished to donate it.
Naively the Council assumed that it had achieved its goal and could consider disbanding. Its members discovered, as their predecessors had learned when they won approval for the state park, that a park remains theoretical without money to pay for it. In 1967, the Council organized another lobbying campaign and managed to secure an initial $1 million appropriation to begin land acquisition.

Expanding the Park
The Save the Dunes Council has since testified at almost every Parks appropriation hearing; land acquisition today is more than 90 percent complete and the park, with Council backing, has won approval to acquire the rest from an administration that has denied all but minimal further land purchase in almost every other national park in the country.

The Council has also lobbied persistently for widened park boundaries. It directed introduction of a bill in 1971 which called for an additional 7,000 acres. That bill never passed; but a 3,800-acre expansion bill did become law in 1976, and another 400-acre boundary addition was authorized by Congress in 1980. The additions included valuable oak savanna and marsh habitats in several separate parcels in the park's West Unit as well as some of the Little Calumet River basin. Prime areas sought but still not acquired include the residential 'island' of Beverly Shores and a 90-acre 'greenbelt' owned by Northern Indiana Public Service Company in the east unit.

Other Threats - The Freight Yard Battle
Land and money have been but two of many concerns which have occupied the Save the Dunes Council's attention since establishment of the Lakeshore, however. It has waged battles with the Park Service itself for a stronger voice at all stages of the planning process; it has successfully fought a number of external threats including offroad vehicle use in the park, sand-mining, a nuclear power plant adjacent to the park, a railroad marshaling yard in the park, (see sidebar, this page), a jet port in Chesterton and an airport in the lake. The Council has also pushed for more stringent enforcement of air and water pollution control laws in the industrial region which brackets the park.

Confrontations with the Park
The group's first confrontation on the subject of planning came soon after the park was established. Its members had assumed, perhaps naively, that the park's commitment to preservation with minimal appropriate development would parallel their own. They were shocked to learn first, therefore, that they had to travel to Indianapolis just to find what the park's development plans were and, second, to find that those plans included 26 separate structures at West Beach-including a swimming pool, an amphitheatre, two bath houses, an artificial dune (!), and a three-story parking garage.

They protested to the newspapers, to their congressional supporters, and to the Secretary of the Interior. They also persuaded the regional planning agency, now the Northwestern Indiana Regional Planning Commission, to hold local hearings on the plan.

Changes in the System
Park Service attitudes have subsequently changed. Local public hearings on General Management Plans are now required throughout the National Park system, and planning personnel within the Service have also since become more attuned to a stronger preservation ethic. At Indiana Dunes, meanwhile, local demand for an on-site planner was approved to supplement the team working long-distance from the park's planning office at the Denver Service Center. A planning advisory group incorporating local and regional planning agencies as well as area citizens' groups was created; and a new, more acceptable General Management Plan for park development eventually emerged.

A 10-year effort to block construction of NIPSCO's proposed Bailly Nuclear Power Plant was among the most significant victories; the Park Service itself was not able to say outright that it opposed nuclear power as such, but the results of research conducted by its science division tended to support the objections of local citizens' groups to its location adjacent to the fragile Cowles Bog area of the park. Chief actors in this long struggle were the Bailly Alliance, the Izaak Walton League, and Business and Professional People for the Public Interest.

The Save the Dunes Council continues today to monitor park development and to work with the National Park Service staff. Its position vis-a-vis the Park Service is supportive, watchful, and wary. The Council recognizes that as a government agency the Service operates under certain constraints and is vulnerable to political pressure. The Council sees its role as being helpful, independent... and tough when the situation warrants. Additions to the Park continue through land donations from The Nature Conservancy and Shirley Heinze Environmental Fund. Its prime purpose is to defend the resource -to protect the park and its natural values which so many have worked so hard, so long, and so determinedly to preserve.

-Sylvia Troy

Sylvia Troy is a long-time dunes resident and indefatigable supporter of preservation efforts. She was president of the Save the Dunes Council 1967-76 and is currently a trustee and secretary of the Shirley Heinze Environmental Fund.

Excerpted from The Indiana Dunes Story -How nature and people made a park
Copyright © Shirley Heinze Fund, 1984
Used by Permission