The Retired Teacher Versus the Steel Mills

Bethlehem Steel had plans for every inch of Indiana's Lake Michigan shoreline. Dorothy Buell had a living room and a petition.

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED MARCH 20, 2026

Indiana does not have a good track record with environmental protection. They destroyed the Grand Kankakee Marsh. They dried up their largest waterfall. They obliterated their largest lake. And that's only the beginning of it.

Most of these stories end the same way: Industrialists profit, ecosystems crumble, the world gets another cornfield or another parking lot.

This is not one of those stories.

In this one, the good guys win.

It starts in 1899, when a University of Chicago botanist named Henry Cowles published a paper based on field studies across the Indiana Dunes. In those dunes, Cowles found an irreplaceable radical biodiversity packed into the shifting sands: cacti growing alongside swamp grasses, an ecosystem unlike anything else in the Midwest. He wrote with scientific reverence about the place.

So of course Indiana spent the next fifty years trying to pave the whole thing over.

By the late 1940s, state leaders and steel executives had a vision: industrialize all 40 miles of Indiana's Lake Michigan shoreline. Bethlehem Steel bought up land and bulldozed the Central Dunes — the most ecologically significant stretch of the whole lakeshore. By the time anyone shouted a complaint, it was too late. There was no putting it back.

That's when Dorothy Buell got involved. The 65-year-old, retired English teacher was living in Ogden Dunes and was freshly returned from a trip to White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. If the federal government could preserve all that white sand, she thought, why not our dunes?

On June 20, 1952, she assembled a group of women in her living room and founded the Save the Dunes Council. One of those women recalled later: "We were naive at first. We didn't think of it as a political movement. We thought no one could be against saving the dunes."

They were wrong.

Indiana's entire congressional delegation, refused to act on Buell's plea, so she took matters into her own hands. Buell gathered 250,000 petition signatures, made a film, screened it for anyone who would sit still, and then made personal visits to all 435 members of the House of Representatives.

She also wrote a letter to Paul Douglas, a senator from Illinois.

Douglas had a summer cottage in the dunes, and even though the Indiana Dunes sat firmly outside his constituency, he became a champion for preservation. He even earned a fun nickname: “The third Senator from Indiana.”

Douglas brought the fight to President Kennedy, who offered a compromise: a national lakeshore and a port, satisfying both the preservationists and the steel interests. Douglas hated it. The Central Dunes were already gone, and the deal made it permanent. Of course, that's the thing about environmental devastation. The destruction was already permanent, and it didn't require a bill to keep it that way.

The final legislation nearly stalled in conference committee until Indiana's own junior senator stepped in to broker the deal. Birch Bayh worked out the compromise that linked port funding to lakeshore authorization, the same legislative sleight of hand that would come to define his career.

In November 1966, President Johnson signed the bill establishing Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Dorothy Buell was 80 years old. She had spent fourteen years on it.

Buell died in 1977. The next parts would have to happen without her.

Four subsequent expansion bills grew the park to more than 15,000 acres. Then in February 2019, buried inside a spending bill that also ended the longest government shutdown in American history, Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore quietly became Indiana Dunes National Park, the 61st national park in the nation.

It took 120 years from Cowles's first field notes to the final designation. The park's visitor center is named after Dorothy Buell.

The good guys won. It just took a while.