Wolf Lake Tales, From Wooly Mammoths To Lynyrd Skynyrd

Jerry Banik, March, 2026

Wolf 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 south west edge, roughly where the Indiana/Illinois state line is today. 

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, creating Wolf Lake, labeled “Sheffield Bay” in this 1874 map. 

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

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. 

Many stories remind us of its historical significance to Whiting and Robertsdale. Here are just a few of them.

• In the late 1820s, before industrial pollution filled our sky, is it possible it was love that 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 historically 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. 

• 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.  Channels had been dredged connecting George Lake, Hyde Lake, and the Calumet River to Wolf Lake, but an 1893 engineering report to the U.S. Congress said the channels “had lately been closed up with earthen dams.”  For decades developers continued to push for the harbor, but every plan ended up in history’s dust bin.   Again, in 1920,  after a half century, developers were still calling for the creation of a Wolf Lake harbor.

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

• Sometimes it seemed Mother Nature sought revenge for what industry was doing to her lake.  An August, 1890 newspaper carried the story of a summer storm:  “Huge trees were torn up by the roots and carried away.  Everything in the path of the tempest was destroyed.  The G.H. Hammond ice house at Wolf Lake was lifted from its foundation and destroyed, and it is reported that several people who sought shelter there were killed.  A man named Fisher was struck by the flying timber and had his leg broken and is internally injured.”  And in yet another story from 1900, “John Murray, a sailor from Buffalo, N.Y., was accidentally locked in an ice house at Wolf Lake, Ind., and when released the next day was nearly frozen.”