Mary Dixon: When most Chicagoans think of Pullman, they think of the South Side. When people think of sandy dunes, they may think of the Indiana Dunes. These places in two states are not often linked, but they are part of one distinct area – the Calumet region. WBEZ's Michael Puente reports on a new exhibit at the field museum that tells the story of this area with its own culture and heritage.

Michael Puente: Alfonso Quiroz walked four blocks nearly every day for more than two decades to get to his job installing doors inside passenger trains for the Pullman Company. He’d often take his own lunch.

Alfonzo Quiroz: I brought my lunch bucket. Over 22 years, going to work every day, walking to work every day. And I brought my ham and cheese sandwich and a thermos full of hot coffee.

Michael Puente: Quiroz, whose parents were Mexican immigrants, never thought that black steel lunch pail he bought at Sears in the 1950s would one day be on display in a museum – the Field Museum no less.

Alfonzo Quiroz: Like I say, if the lunchbucket can talk, it could tell you some real good stories.

Michael Puente: After Pullman closed in 1981, Quiroz worked two more years at the company’s other plant in Hammond, Indiana – just a couple of miles away from his home where he still lives. The 86-year-old Quiroz says even though there are two states, the connections with other industrial cities – like Blue Island, Gary and Michigan City – make the Calumet region unique.

Alfonzo Quiroz: There's a lot of history, hidden history, forgotten history of the Calumet area.

Mark Bouman: It’s a crossroads of the continent. It’s a crossroads ecologically. You’ve got tall grass prairies, you’ve got hardwood forests, northern forests and dry landscapes and wet landscapes all coming together here.

Michael Puente: Mark Bouman is the Chicago Region Program Director at the Field. He helped put together the museum’s "Calumet Voices, National Stories" exhibit that looks at the indigenous past of the region, the introduction of heavy industry and the movement to reclaim and restore lands impacted by pollution. Bouman says the region spans five counties, two states and 1.5 million people.

Mark Bouman: Southern end of Lake Michigan from roughly Blue Island to roughly Michigan City. It’s the dunes. It’s the industries. It's all the neighborhoods in between, south to roughly the Kankakee River.

Michael Puente: The exhibit features artifacts such as tobacco pipes and strands of wild rice from the indigenous tribes that called this area home, including the Shawnee and Potawatomi. There are 18th century maps showing the area before wealthy industrialists – like George Pullman, John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie – arrived and transformed it with railcars, oil and steel. A steelworker’s green uniform and hard hat are on display along with photographs showing industry living side by side with nature as rich as any place on earth.

Mark Bouman: The major center of American steelmaking to this day, refineries, automobile manufacturing, all the related industries and it’s where people came together from around the world.

Michael Puente: Beyond retelling of history, Bouman says this exhibit is part of an effort to one day have the federal government classify the region as the Calumet National Heritage Area. There are 55 National Heritage Areas in the U.S., two in Illinois, but none in Indiana.

Mark Bouman: There’s region identity in Northwest Indiana for sure, but that’s often as a defense against Chicago or a defense against downstate Indiana.

Michael Puente: Janet Hong, senior project manager at the Field, says “Calumet Voices” involved 18 partners – including libraries and historical societies in the south suburbs and Northwest Indiana. One of Hong’s favorite items is a 4-foot by 10-foot thin steel plate with the names of three women etched on it. It’s from the Inland Steel Company in East Chicago, Indiana during World War II when women were called to work as men went off to war.

Janet Hong: I love this object. It just makes these women realer than real. I mean... Gert and Stella and Thelma, they wrote on this, June 4th, 1943.

Michael Puente: Hong hopes those who visit the exhibit do more than just walk through it.

Janet Hong: It’s one of these exhibitions at the museum where I hope people come but then launches them outside to go to the Indiana Dunes, to go to Pullman, to go to the Porter County Museum.

Michael Puente: “Calumet Voices, National Stories” runs through next October. Michael Puente, WBEZ News.

WBEZ transcripts are generated by an automatic speech recognition service. We do our best to edit for misspellings and typos, but mistakes do come through.