Wolf Lake Tales,

From Wooly Mammoths To Lynyrd Skynyrd

Jerry Banik, March, 2026

Wolf Lake has been called the lake that won’t die.  Since the arrival of the first European settlers, it has been battered, beaten, abused, reshaped, dredged, filled and sliced into sections.  It has also been a source of fun and recreation for countless swimmers, fishermen, boaters and others. 

The lake’s story goes back to the Ice Age, a time when, we’re told, glaciers gouged out Lake Michigan. 

About 1,000 years ago there had been a bay on Lake Michigan’s southwest edge, roughly where the Indiana/Illinois state line is today.  Over time, currents ran down Lake Michigan’s western shores, picking up sand and sediment along the way, and depositing enough of it to cut off the bay from the big lake, thus creating Wolf Lake, labeled “Sheffield Bay” in this 1874 map, which also shows its little brother, “Lake George.“

The new lake was connected to Lake Michigan by only a short, shallow channel, known as the Wolf River.  Today’s “Amaizo Channel” is a remnant of that inlet.

By the way, do you say George Lake, or Lake George?  It’s been called both over the years.  You choose.  But either way, someone will say you’re dyslexic.

Here are just a few stories of what Wolf Lake is, was, and might have been.

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• Fort Dearborn in Roby?

  In the late 1820s, long before industrial fragrances filled the skies around Amaizo Channel, is it possible love was in the air?

A young army Lieutenant, Jefferson Davis (yes, that Jefferson Davis) had been sent by the U.S. military to survey land around the mouths of the Chicago, the Calumet and the Wolf Rivers for a site on which to build a replacement for Chicago’s militarily important Fort Dearborn. 

The story goes that Davis was favoring the Wolf River location, but then abandoned that plan in order to recommend that the army rebuild on the Chicago site because he had a sweetheart there, and her father owned property around that site.  But for romance, imagine what Robertsdale might have become!

• Wolf Lake Harbor and Seaport

Despite early studies and maps describing Wolf Lake as being only 2-4 feet deep, as early as 1875 government engineers said it would make a fine harbor that could be “developed with very moderate cost, bringing millions of wealth to the State (Indianapolis Journal).”  In the 1880s, a 600-foot pier into Lake Michigan existed at the mouth of the Wolf River, and channels had been dredged connecting George Lake, Hyde Lake, Wolf Lake and the Calumet River, but an 1893 engineering report to the U.S. Congress said the channels “had lately been closed up with earthen dams.”  Still for decades developers continued to push for the harbor, but every plan ended up in history’s dust bin. 

• Ice in our veins

Armies of cutters once harvested ice from both Wolf Lake and George Lake.  Ice companies, among them Knickerbocker, Swift & Company, Otto Haehnel & Sons, G.H. Hammond and Consumers Ice, dotted Wolf Lake from its southern end near today’s 136th Street in North Hammond to its northern shore. 

• A Canadian incursion

After Chicago’s great World’s Fair of 1893, a French-Canadian fur trapper, Elias Bennet, purchased the State of Delaware building from the Fair, put it on a barge and towed it down to Wolf Lake, then set it on the best spot he could find on the Illinois side, even though he didn’t own the land.  After an eviction notice, it took a deputy sheriff and 25 men 36 hours to get Bennet out after he shot at them through his bedroom door.

• Are you old enough to remember Crane Lake? 

Isolated from the main body of Wolf Lake by an earthen dike, a June, 1952 Hammond Times story described it as “a small body of water near the south tip of Wolf Lake, much used by swimmers these days,” with “no lifeguards and nothing to indicate it is a public playground.”

• Divide and conquer

  Today, Wolf Lake is chopped into eight separate impoundments, five on the Illinois side and three in Indiana.

• An amusement park that wasn’t

In 1895, commissioned by a Chicago developer, world renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed a grand amusement park to be built on dredged marsh land at Wolf Lake. Designed with avenues, promenades, casinos, a band stand, dance halls and more, it never moved past the drawing board.  It did, though, inspire the architecture of today’s Pavilion at Wolf Lake Memorial Park, which has featured performances by Sammy Hagar, Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute bands and many other musical virtuosos.

• An amusement park that was

  1914 brought hydro-biplanes and the Athey Hydro Amusement Park to Amaizo Channel. Sadly, it didn’t last long.
  

• “Take 119th west, through the lake, to 116th in Chicago.”

  In 1920, one of several unrealized plans for a “Wolf Lake Park and Boulevard System,” was proposed. It was a precursor to today’s Water Gardens neighborhood.

This plan called for a road to run from the intersection of Calumet and Sheffield Avenues up and across the north end of the lake, where it would connect to 116th Street in Illinois. 

It included a bathing beach along its new Roosevelt Boulevard, near present day Amaizo Channel.

• Gentlemen, start your engines

  In the first half of the last century, from Roby on the north down to 129th street on the south, Robertsdale had four separate auto race tracks.  In the 1930s, two of them were built at Wolf Lake. 

In 1933, the first of the two, acclaimed in the Hammond Times as “the world’s most unique racing plant,” was built of sand, entirely in the water of Wolf Lake.  This island raceway featured a one-mile track for race cars and stock cars, and another filled with water inside that track for racing speed boats and hydro-gliders.  

The second track, built in 1935, was a one-fifth of a mile “midget” racetrack, squeezed between Calumet Avenue and the site of the racetrack in the lake, on a parcel of made land.  Newspapers said the midget track featured spectacular races that attracted national attention.

Both of the tracks were very short-lived ventures.

• Wolf Lake airport and sewer route

  1934:  Hammond’s mayor, Charles Schonert, calls for a new airport to be built at Wolf Lake, to accommodate both sea planes and land planes.  A “veteran Hammond insurance man” then proposed an elaborate project to have special, centrifugal dredges carry sand from Lake Michigan into Wolf Lake to build the new land for the airport.  Calling Wolf Lake a “stagnant pool,” the scheme would drain the waters of both Wolf and George Lakes into the Indiana Harbor and Ship Canal, and from there into Lake Michigan.

  The plan never got off the ground, though, possibly in part due to Illinois resistance, since the scheme included construction of a sewer main running from Schrage Avenue in Whiting to Burnham, to carry Whiting and East Chicago sewage there to be incinerated.

1951 -- The Russians were coming

To defend us from Russian bombers, the U.S. Army built a Nike air defense missile station due west of Robertsdale’s Water Gardens, at the state line.  They created a launch area site by filling roughly a hundred acres of Wolf Lake wetlands adjacent to Eggers Woods with landfill, mostly slag. The station has long since been decommissioned.

• Voyage to the bottom of the sea lake

• And finally, this oft repeated story, the credibility of which is suspect, to say the least:

A Whiting man is walking along the shore of Wolf Lake with a bucket of fish.  He is approached by a game warden.

Game warden:  "I’d like to see your fishing license, please."

Whiting man: "Don’t have one, don’t need one.”

Game warden:  “How’s that?”

Whiting man:  “These are my pet fish.  I sometimes bring ‘em down here, dump ‘em in the water and let ‘em swim for a while.  Then I call ‘em back, they jump back into my bucket, and we go home."

Game warden:  "Well, I'm gonna have to write you up, wise guy."

Whiting man: "Let me show you." He dumps the fish into the lake and waits.

A few minutes go by.

Game warden:  "Well, are you going to call them back?"

Whiting man:  "Call who back?"

Game warden:  “THE FISH!”

Whiting man:  “What fish?”

You can get more details and in-depth information about many of the topics in this article, such as Athey Hydro Park, Whiting ice houses, the Water Gardens neighborhood, NIKE missile installations and more. Simply click on the “Collections” tab at the top of this page, then select “Index” in the drop down menu. There, you can enter search words to retrieve links to many topics in the Whiting-Robertsdale Historical Society web site. When there, you can also scroll through our entire list of previously published articles.