Outdoor Indiana - May/June 2022

Lincoln State Park celebrates president’s Hoosier heritage

By Scott Roberts, OI staff

Children fish at Lake Lincoln while staying with their parents at Lincoln State Park’s family cabins. Young Abraham Lincoln lived for 14 years among the area’s woods and waters. (John Maxwell photo)

It’s December 1816. A wagon with all of the Lincoln family’s possessions rolls down a dirt road toward a new home, a wooded area in Perry County in southwest Indiana.

Thomas Lincoln hopes this land will be easier to protect and develop. Much of the  Kentucky property he claimed over the past 10 years was pried from him in a series of disputes. The family also chose to move because it disagrees with slavery, which is legal in Kentucky but banned by Indiana’s constitution.

There  are enough trees to build a cabin, and the soil seems fertile enough for farming. The Ohio River, a few miles south, provides easy access to markets. Thomas hopes there will be enough food, wood, and merchants to trade with to support his wife Nancy and two children, Sarah, 9, and Abraham, 7.

“We  reached our new home about the time the State came into the Union,” the son  would write in his second autobiography. “It was a wild region, with many bears  and other wild animals in the woods. There I grew up.”

The Lincolns spent the next 14 years on that plot of  land. They experienced triumphs, like expanding their property by 20 acres and turning it into a working farm that would supply their needs. There was also  tragedy. Nancy Hanks Lincoln died in 1818 of milk sickness, which is caused by drinking contaminated milk from cows that fed on white snakeroot. Nearly 10 years later, Sarah Lincoln Grigsby died in childbirth.

Abraham  Lincoln and a few members of his family moved to Illinois in 1830.

His  legacy is celebrated today on the grounds he trod almost 200 years ago, which  is now Lincoln State Park and the Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial.

Indiana’s lighthouses serve historic, symbolic purpose

By Scott Roberts, OI staff
Photography by Frank Oliver

The Michigan City Pierhead Light and Michigan City Breakwater Light have lit the city’s harbor for more than 100 years.

A piercing white beam can be seen from Michigan City’s East Pierhead Light at Washington Park each night.

On  stormy evenings, its foghorn can be heard, two blasts every 30 seconds. The sound is called the light’s characteristic, or how it’s distinguished from other lights.

The light’s purpose is now mostly symbolic. It was deemed excess by the U.S. Coast  Guard in 2007 and is now maintained by Michigan City as a tourist destination and a symbol for the region. It’s photographed several times a day and thousands of times a year. Its image appears on marketing materials for the city, from  brochures to websites to trinkets available in shops along the shore.

That flashing light also serves as a beacon to the past, to a time when ships needed that beam and foghorn blast to guide them into the city’s harbor, one of the first on southern Lake Michigan. The pierhead light  was built in late 1904 at the end of a newly constructed quarter-mile-long  breakwater. The shipping industry on the Great Lakes was just beginning, and by 1910, the amount of goods it transported reached 80 million tons.

In  1911, the Pierhead Light received illumination help from the Michigan City Breakwater Light, a 23-foot-tall white tower with a flashing red light located on the other side of the breakwater.

Both lights replaced the Old Michigan City Lighthouse. It was built in 1858 and is now a museum showcasing the navigational history of the city. It’s the only true lighthouse in Indiana, because it’s the only one still standing that keepers once lived in and maintained. Those are usually the only light structures that can technically be called lighthouses, even though common usage has morphed to mean almost any structure on the water with a light in it.

While the harbor lights at Michigan City were the first in Indiana, they were joined by others along Indiana’s 45 miles of shoreline. Remnants of the Indiana Harbor Light in East Chicago and the Calumet Harbor Lighthouse in Hammond still stand, along with the Buffington Harbor Breakwater and Gary Breakwater lights, both in  Gary.

The three Michigan City lights are on the National Register of Historic Places. Paul Diebold, an architectural historian with DNR Division of Historic Preservation & Archaeology, said lighthouses helped bring the industrial  era to Indiana and helped the state modernize.

“Railroads and ships were moving things inside the country way more than people now  realize, and that started with ports and lighthouses to guide these ships into them,” he said.

Lighthouses also tell us about ourselves. Many people see their lives and struggles through the historic structures’ constant vigils, which may be one reason so many still take pictures of them.