Hammond, Indiana, is an industrial, Rust Belt city nestled in the corner between Indiana, Illinois, and Lake Michigan. It is home to countless factories and around 76,000 people. It's nestled near BP’s largest oil refinery and Gary Works, where U.S. Steel has operated one of the biggest steel mills in the world since 1908. Interstate 80/94 runs laterally through the city, hosting some of the heaviest truck traffic in the country. Railroads line the town like notches on a worn cutting board, with trains sometimes stalling in Hammond for hours, waiting to haul into Chicago.
There are only three designated nature preserves within Hammond’s 24 square miles. The rest of the land is densely developed with factories, shopping centers, and housing. Asphalt, concrete, and rail lines are the predominant features of the landscape.
But there is one remarkable spot of green in Hammond that stands out from the rest: the Briar East Woods. It is not a protected preserve, but it is a 32-acre remnant of the 4,700-year-old High Tolleston Dunes, an ancient shoreline of Lake Michigan. It is home to ancient black oak trees and sand dunes. Here you can find nesting red-tailed hawks and barred owls, bullfrogs and DeKay’s brown snakes, and countless other native flora and fauna.
Dr. Kenneth Schoon, Professor Emeritus of Science Education at Indiana University Northwest, has described the Briar East Woods as a native sand ridge and swale ecosystem, significant as it is older than the dune and swale topography found at the nearby Gibson Woods nature preserve. Local Field Botanist Sandy O’Brien gave the area a 73% native rating, not too shabby considering the heavily urbanized environment.
Though this city-owned parcel is geologically important to the region, it has been degraded by decades of neglect. All the same, Briar East Woods has long been enjoyed by local residents and neighborhood kids for solitude and recreation. Regular stewardship began only recently.
In 2018, the city of Hammond applied for state grant funding to build a winding, half-mile bridge through 12 acres of the Briar East Woods. Ken Rosek, a Hammond native who frequented the woods as a child and now lives just blocks away from them, learned of this project a couple years later. The more details that came out -- through the Freedom of Information Act requests he filed -- the more concerned he became. The city was planning to develop the woods into 68 residential lots and a couple commercial properties, under the guise of building a foot bridge to get around those stalled trains.
And so the Hessville Dune Dusters were born. Named for the neighborhood in Hammond where the Briar East Woods are situated and for their devoted neighbors. Clean ups were among Ken’s first strategies to save the Briar East Woods by helping the city understand them as a natural area worth saving.
Neighbors could come, grab a trash bag, and spend a couple hours picking up the litter that blows in from the townhomes’ dumpsters behind the woods and also haul out tires, furniture, car parts, and much more, that have been dumped there over the years.
Since 2020, the Hessville Dune Dusters have cleared hundreds of bags of trash out of the Briar East Woods. We’ve hauled out pool stairs, rugs, and chairs, turning what naysayers might like to call a “dumpsite” into a clean, inviting place for the community to enjoy a nature walk and discover the beauty of one of the region’s oldest ecosystems. Some of our clean ups have been attended by buses of local students and friends of the forest from all across Northwest Indiana and Chicagoland.
What started as a couple concerned neighbors has now grown into a movement of 1,700 Facebook followers and 2,000+ petition signers. Hundreds of people have participated in clean ups, and we will continue rallying more neighbors out into these woods to appreciate and care for this little slice of natural paradise in our industrial city.
For many people it’s about feeling that sense of community, of service; taking care of our land, our home, our Earth. It might not seem like the most fun activity at first glance, but many can say, like me, that after I attended my first clean up, I left with a sense of accomplishment and connection, to both the environment and the people around me, that I hadn’t quite experienced before.
After five years of “dune dusting,” the Briar East Woods is increasingly treasured. But it is still under threat of destruction. Please sign our petition and consider donating to our GoFundMe. You can visit our website at savebriareastwoods.com to learn more and watch our documentary, by Hessville resident Jana Abouhashem. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram to stay up-to-date on our fight to Save Briar East Woods and to find out when we are holding our next clean up. We would love to see you there, and dust some dunes together.
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