Lake Calumet - History

History

Until the 1800s, Lake Calumet was near the center of an extensive wetland area near the southern tip of Lake Michigan. Like other wetland areas, the Lake Calumet area and its rivers were a center of Native American life and settlement. The Field Museum maintains databases of archeological data on these settlements.

In 1861, the Lake Calumet region was mapped into Hyde Park Township south of what was then the frontier town of Chicago. As the 19th century approached its end, and because the lake's Calumet River created shipping opportunities out onto Lake Michigan, the swampy zone was rapidly filled and developed by industry in the 1880s. Hyde Park Township boomed and was annexed into Chicago in 1889. The area remains heavily industrialized today.

The Chicago neighborhood of Pullman, with its railroad passenger car factories, was sited on the lake's west shore. Steel mills began to line the Calumet River. The Illinois Central railroad was built nearby. In the 1950s, part of the former lakebed was utilized as a right-of-way for a freeway originally named in the lake's honor, the Calumet Expressway. Another parcel of former wetland, south of the lake, was designated as what is now the Paxton Landfill, the final home for much of the household and industrial solid waste generated within the city of Chicago. Some of the landfilling work was done with steel mill slag and other industrial wastes. The presence of hazardous chemicals in much of the fill material created a push to add parts of the Lake Calumet area to the Superfund list.

In 1996, the Calumet Expressway was renamed the Bishop Ford Freeway, honoring Chicago religious leader Bishop Louis Henry Ford at the expense of the half-infilled lake.