The story
Welcome to Harbert
Harbert is a small lakeshore community in Chikaming Township, best remembered as the home of the poet Carl Sandburg and his family from 1928 to 1945. Here he finished much of his great Lincoln biography, while his wife Lilian raised a dairy goat herd that won national notice. A state historical marker in Harbert Community Park tells the story.
Harbert lies in the country south and west of the St. Joseph River that the Potawatomi ceded to the United States at the Carey Mission in 1828. Franklin Ellis (1880) and Orville Coolidge (1906) both give the township’s name, Chikaming, as an Indian word meaning “lake.” Walter Romig (1973) says the region around Harbert was barren and sandy, though a small swamp kept the vegetation green all season, and Ellis notes that the sandy lakeshore strip turned out to be good fruit land.
In the 1850s and 1860s this shore was lumber country. Ellis describes the Wilkinson company’s piers and horse railroad just to the south, and the lumber and cordwood shipped from piers along the beach to Chicago. Harbert itself came later. The Berrien County Genealogical Society says it was founded in 1887 and named for an Evanston, Illinois, attorney who owned property there; when he asked the railroad for a stop, the company agreed on condition that he build the station, and he did.
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Summer people from Chicago followed the railroad. In 1926 Carl Sandburg and his family rented a summer place on the lake, and two years later, the state marker says, they bought lots in Harbert. Lilian Steichen Sandburg designed a house on the bluff that became their year-round home. Sandburg wrote much of Abraham Lincoln: The War Years there, the work that won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1940. The house, now private, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
In 1935 Lilian Sandburg bought a small herd of goats, and the family named the property Chikaming Goat Farm. The marker says the name honored an early Native people of the area; the National Park Service says the herd was named after the township; the county histories give Chikaming as the word for “lake.” Her breeding program earned national recognition for milk production. In 1945, seeking a milder climate, the family moved to Connemara, their farm in North Carolina. Sandburg told a local newspaper, as the marker quotes him, “I’ve traveled from coast to coast … and I find Harbert best of all. Lake Michigan is beautiful and I love this spot.”
Neighboring summer communities grew up along the shore: Bethany Beach, named by Swedish Baptists from Chicago, according to the Genealogical Society; Shorewood Hills, begun in the early 1920s; and Hazelhurst, a cottage camp of the Prairie Club of Chicago. The census counts Harbert together with its neighbors as the Shorewood–Tower Hills–Harbert census-designated place, which had 1,249 people in 2020.
