The story
Welcome to Michiana
Michiana is a small village of log and frame homes tucked among the wooded dunes at the far southwest corner of Michigan, with the Indiana line at its southern edge. Laid out in the late 1920s as a lakeshore retreat for Chicago families, it is still a quiet residential place, and its Lake Michigan beach is open to the public.
The ground under Michiana lies south and west of the St. Joseph River, in the part of Berrien County that the Potawatomi ceded to the United States in the treaty made at the Carey Mission, near Niles, in 1828. Franklin Ellis (1880) explains that the land north and east of the river had been given up at Chicago in 1821 and that this southwestern corner followed seven years later. For most of the next century the dune country along the state line was thick woods and wet hollows, part of New Buffalo Township, which Ellis says was organized in March 1836.
The nearest town was New Buffalo, laid out in 1835 at the mouth of the Galien River. Ellis records that the Michigan Central Railroad chose New Buffalo for its western terminus and began work there in the fall of 1847, and that the line was carried on to Chicago about 1852, running southwest along the shore toward Michigan City. Just across the state line, the inland part of what is now Michiana Shores, Indiana, was a logging and railroad settlement called Corymbo in the 1860s and 1870s, with a post office from 1861.
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The resort itself came late. The village’s own history says the dense woods and marshy ground kept developers away until 1927, when the Long Beach Development Company began laying out land on both sides of the state line at the same time. A big oak at the corner of Michiana Drive and Ponchartrain Trail, the Signal Oak, became the community’s landmark. The company built an amphitheater around it, where, the village history says, it staged “Indian ceremonies” to entertain prospective buyers. The tree is gone, but the amphitheater lived on as the meeting place of the Michiana Community Association, which looked after local business before there was a village government.
Many of the first houses were log homes, built in the 1920s, and the place became a vacation colony for Chicago families about 67 miles away. On the Indiana side, Barbara Stodola’s history of the Michigan City beach communities says that Orphie Gotto and Clarence Mathias began building a log-cabin town for vacationers in the 1930s, and that many of the early residents were Chicago schoolteachers.
The developers called the whole area Michigan Shores. Walter Romig (1973) says the Michigan side was the first to incorporate and, unwilling to lose its identity, chose the name Michiana, a blend of Michigan and Indiana. Romig, the Berrien County Genealogical Society and Gary Barfknecht’s almanac of Michigan dates all give the year of incorporation as 1945; the village’s own history says 1946. The Indiana side incorporated separately as the town of Michiana Shores in 1947.
Over the decades the summer colony became a year-round village. In its own words it means “to remain a quiet, residential community dedicated to the needs and comforts of its residents.” The beaches are public, though the village provides no public parking. The 2020 census counted 200 people in Michiana.