Lake County, IN

Settlement & growth (pre-1960)

Before American settlement, the region was inhabited by the Miami and Potawatomi nations, who used the Lake Michigan shoreline and the Calumet River system for fishing and trade. French fur traders and missionaries passed through the area in the 17th and 18th centuries, but no permanent European settlements took hold until after the 1795 Treaty of Greenville and subsequent land cessions. The Potawatomi were forcibly removed in the 1830s via the Trail of Death, opening the land to Yankee and Mid-Atlantic settlers who founded the county’s earliest towns, including Crown Point (the county seat, established 1834) and Lowell (1834). These early communities were agricultural, with small populations of English, Scots-Irish, and German farmers.

The county’s character changed dramatically after 1889, when the discovery of vast iron ore deposits in the Upper Peninsula and the construction of the Calumet River shipping canal made the Lake Michigan shoreline ideal for steel production. Gary was founded in 1906 by the United States Steel Corporation as a planned industrial city, and it quickly became a magnet for European immigrants. Between 1900 and 1920, tens of thousands of Polish, Italian, Serbian, Croatian, and Greek immigrants arrived to work in the mills, settling in Gary’s “Ethnic Triangle” neighborhoods and in the adjacent towns of East Chicago and Hammond. By 1930, foreign-born residents made up over 30% of the county’s population, and the steel mills employed more than 50,000 workers at their peak.

The second major demographic shift came during the Great Migration (1915–1970), when hundreds of thousands of Black families fled Jim Crow segregation in the Deep South for industrial jobs in the North. Lake County was a primary destination, with Black workers recruited directly by steel companies to break strikes and fill labor shortages. By 1960, Gary’s population was over 40% Black, and the city had become a national center of Black political and cultural life, producing figures like Richard Hatcher (the first Black mayor of a major U.S. city, elected in 1967) and the Jackson family musical dynasty. Smaller Black communities also formed in Hammond and East Chicago, though Gary remained the epicenter.

A third, smaller wave arrived during the Dust Bowl and World War II eras: white migrants from the Ozarks and Appalachia, often called “hillbillies” at the time, who settled in the southern part of the county, particularly around Cedar Lake and St. John. These families worked in the mills and in construction, and their descendants remain a visible cultural presence in the county’s rural and exurban towns.

Modern era (post-1965)

The 1965 Hart-Cellar Act ended the national-origins quota system and opened immigration from Asia and Latin America. For Lake County, the most significant post-1965 change has been the rapid growth of the Hispanic population, which rose from under 5% in 1970 to over 20% today. The first wave consisted of Mexican and Puerto Rican workers recruited for the steel mills and meatpacking plants in East Chicago and Hammond, where Hispanic neighborhoods now dominate the city cores. A second wave, beginning in the 1990s, brought immigrants from Central America (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras) who settled in Gary and Lake Station, often working in construction, hospitality, and warehousing. Today, East Chicago is over 60% Hispanic, and Hammond is nearly 40% Hispanic, with Spanish-language storefronts, churches, and festivals defining the commercial landscape.

The Black population, meanwhile, has undergone a dramatic geographic shift. Gary’s Black population peaked at over 100,000 in the 1970s, but deindustrialization and white flight reduced the city’s total population by more than half. Many Black families moved to the county’s southern and western suburbs, including Merrillville, Hobart, and Schererville, which are now majority-Black or heavily integrated. Merrillville, in particular, has become a hub for Black middle-class life, with strong school systems, Black-owned businesses, and a growing professional class.

The white population has declined in absolute numbers since 1970, but remains concentrated in the county’s southern and western exurbs. St. John, Dyer, and Munster are predominantly white, upper-middle-class communities with strong school districts and low crime rates, attracting families who commute to Chicago or work in the region’s healthcare and logistics sectors. The East/Southeast Asian community (1.0%) is small but visible, with a concentration of Filipino and Vietnamese families in Merrillville and Schererville, often employed in healthcare and engineering. The Indian-subcontinent population (0.5%) is even smaller, with families scattered across the southern suburbs, many working in information technology and medicine.