Sand and Glass: The Hoosier Slide

At eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning in 1930 government dignitaries and civic leaders gathered to lay the cornerstone for a structure that represented, according to an editorial writer for the Michigan City News, “a new industrial era” for the city—a $9 million generating plant for the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The writer envisioned the “location of many splendid industries in Michigan City,” attracted by the availability of cheap power, a good transportation system, and the city’s central location in the United States.

Buried in the description of the event was the information that the station occupied a tract of land formerly home to one of the area’s notable landmarks, the giant sand dune known as the Hoosier Slide. Today, nothing is left of the mountain of sand that could be seen as far away as Chicago and managed, year after year, to attract countless tourists to its slopes and provided a way for enterprising merchants to make a living.

By the late nineteenth century, the Hoosier Slide, along with the Indiana State Prison, attracted tourists from Chicago, Lafayette, Peru, Indianapolis, and other communities. The Monon, Lake Erie & Western, and Michigan Central railroad lines lured passengers to Michigan City by touting the Hoosier Slide’s beauty and its panoramic view of Lake Michigan. Even those just passing through on trains were awed by the Hoosier Slide’s size. Writing about the sand hill, Carter H. Manny, whose father William B. Manny would be one of the first to see the potential industrial uses for Hoosier Slide, noted that “some people from afar who passed through in the winter time often inquired of the railroad men how such a big pile of snow got there.”

A number of excursion steamers also made Michigan City a main destination. Ships such as the Theodore Roosevelt, United States, Indianapolis, Soo City, City of Grand Rapids, and Christopher Columbus brought countless visitors to Michigan City’s shores. The Michigan City News announced on August 17, 1887, that 600 tourists, after working up an appetite while seeing the sights, had dined at Shultz’s restaurant. Gladys Bull Nicewarner, in her history of the city, reported that on one day in 1914 six steamers brought approximately 10,000 people to see the northwest Indiana community’s attractions.

To entice more and more tourists to their fair city, Michigan City merchants offered merchandise and cash prizes for races up the giant sand pile’s slopes and even held marriage ceremonies on its peak. An Indiana State Prison official, hoping to attract visitors from southern Indiana, offered a free marriage license, minister, and excursion to any couple who would be willing to exchange their wedding vows on Hoosier Slide. A Mr. Plasterer, a southern Indiana farmer, and his bride-to-be accepted the offer, and many residents and tourists trooped up the sandy slopes to witness the happy occasion.

In addition to marriages, the towering sand dune hosted hill-climbing contests, firework shows, and wrestling and boxing matches. Daredevil youngsters used wooden toboggans and hand-fashioned metal sheets to slide down the hill during winter and summer. The ship captains who brought tourists and freight to Michigan City also depended on the landmark.

The beginning of the end for Hoosier Slide came in the late 1890s. From time to time the Monon Railroad, which ran a switch track alongside the hill’s eastern slope, received requests from a downstate Monon agent for Michigan City sand. It was used to sand railroad tracts for better traction. This development caught the attention of William Manny, who worked for the line for several years and grew up in Michigan City. Manny and I. I. Spiro, a local lawyer, began purchasing large amounts of the lakefront, believing that the region was ripe for industrial development. Hoosier Slide was part of this property, and in 1906 Manny incorporated the Hoosier Slide Sand Company. The giant sand dune’s death warrant had been signed.

The Hoosier Slide’s destruction was aided by the industrial boom that occurred after the discovery of extensive supplies of natural gas in central Indiana in the mid-1880s. Cities such as Muncie, Anderson, Kokomo, Richmond, and others were soon besieged with new factories wanting to take advantage of this cheap natural resource. Glass companies, for example Ball Brothers in Muncie and the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company in Kokomo, sent north for Michigan City sand to help manufacture their products.

Glass factories were not the only concerns clamoring for sand, according to Carter Manny, who upon his return from college in 1912 took over the sand business from his father. Manny, who faced competition from another firm, the Pinkston Sand Company, which was served by the Michigan Central Railroad, filled orders not only from Indiana businesses, but also from companies as far away as Massachusetts and Mexico. Hoosier Slide sand was used for making glass insulators for telegraph and telephone poles, cores in iron foundries, canning jars for the Ball Brothers Company in Muncie, sand beaches for lakes and municipal bathing areas, and as fill for sand traps at Hoosier humorist George Ade’s private golf course in Kentland, Indiana.

In the beginning, workers (known as dockwallopers) loaded the sand into freight cars using wheelbarrows, planks, and shovels. Eventually, the sand was loaded through a system using tracks and small dump cars. The new system, however, created a problem. Although the dumb cars were chained down after work was over, youngsters sneaked into the area, broke locks, and took joyrides down the tracks. “I recall that when I visited this spot one Sunday afternoon with my father,” said Carter Manny, “we arrived just in time to see one of these cars loaded with boys come barging down the trestle and across its end to fall on the other side of the freight tracks below.”

As the sand operation grew, the railroad tracks encompassed the Hoosier Slide’s northeast corner and traveled down around its north side, which faced Lake Michigan. Between the tracks and the lake, a small village of sand workers sprouted. “It was a hard life, but one seemingly enjoyed by the people,” Manny noted. During the winter, when frigid blasts whipped shoreward from Lake Michigan carrying cutting sand particles, the dockwallopers enjoyment of life perhaps lessened considerably.

Manny implemented more efficient mining methods when he took over the business from his father in 1912. Within two years, the Hoosier Slide Sand Company became the first firm to purchase a small locomotive crane to load the sand. Manny also experimented with a machine, powered by electricity, that tossed the sand back into the ends of the boxcars. The era of the dockwalloper came to an end.

By the early 1920s the Hoosier Slide Sand Company, in conjunction with the Pinkston Sand Company, had managed to level what had once been Michigan City’s main landmark. With the demise of the giant dune, Manny moved his sand operation west of the former Hoosier Slide to virgin duneland. The leveled land was eventually sold by the Pinkston and Hoosier Slide companies to NIPSCO as the site for its power generating station.

The amount of sand moved in the years since the first shovel broke the ground is a matter of conjecture. Some have estimated the amount at approximately 13.5 million tons (based on fifty tons of sand per railroad car and three hundred shipping days per year over a thirty-year period). Manny, however, who had years of on-site experience, believed that estimate to be “exaggerated” and placed the total tonnage at nine million, which he based on a twenty-year period of removal.

Whatever the total amount removed, the result was the same—Hoosier Slide was gone. For today’s visitors to Michigan City’s lakefront, all that remains are the photographs and memories.