Critical Calumet 2025

An important part of the Calumet Heritage Area’s mission to protect cultural heritage places and natural sites is the annual endangered list titled Critical Calumet.

The Critical Calumet list is compiled each year to create awareness of sites throughout our region that are in need of attention – some have sat vacant for years, others still in use with maintenance needs, and everything in between. The goal of the list is to advocate for the safeguarding of historically and culturally significant places that may be little known outside of their immediate communities, and by doing so creating opportunities for the documentation, rehabilitation, or reuse of the Calumet Heritage Area’s architecture, art, nature, and beyond. 
 
This year’s Critical Calumet list features five sacred spaces in the Calumet Heritage Area facing uncertain futures. Both for the preservation of historic architecture and the sustainability of our environment, it is crucial to reuse these buildings and keep their materials out of landfills.

Indiana

Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church (Bethel Lutheran Church & Cemetery)

The Calumet region was home to numerous Swedish communities beginning in the 1840s through the 1920s. The Swedish Evangelical Lutheran Church (now Bethel Lutheran Church) was founded June 26, 1874 by eleven of those Swedish immigrant families. The Miller congregation met in a local schoolhouse for twenty years. By 1894, the congregation constructed the modest, vernacular style church located on the corner of Lake St. and 4 th Avenue in Miller where it remains to this day and functions as a Baptist Church. The building housed the congregation for many years until a new church was constructed a few miles east on Montgomery Street.

Bethel Lutheran Cemetery – Description
The modest 2-acre site on a wooded sand dune between US-20 and US 12 is the final resting place for many of Miller’s earliest residents. Samuel and Susan Miller (of Miller Station namesake) buried their three-year-old son on this land in 1851, followed by three more Millers. Originally private land, it was not until 1882 that the cemetery was officially designated as a burial ground. Many of those buried at the cemetery are of Swedish origin and likely worshipped at the Lutheran Church not far away on Lake Street. In fact, Swedish immigrants Magnus Anderson and Niklas Nikalsson were both charter members of Bethel Lutheran; both are buried at the cemetery. The site also has many victims of the Aetna Powder Company’s numerous fatal accidents in 1888, 1912, 1914 and 1917. Veterans of the Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II are also interred on this small hillside. The last burial to occur on site was 2002. With approximately 150 known headstones the site is a critical piece of Calumet history. It is currently in urgent need of volunteers to help maintain its grounds.

First United Methodist Church
Hammond, IN

Founded in 1886, Hammond’s First United Methodist Church constructed their original church building in downtown Hammond in 1899. The current First United Methodist Church is a mid-century modern design constructed in 1985. The sanctuary space is defined by its centralization of the pastor with pews radiating out. It features a series of modern stained glass clerestory windows depicting biblical scenes that wraps the perimeter of the sanctuary. The church is marked by a tall, thin spire that stretched up from the center point of the sanctuary.

Hammond’s First United Methodist Church held their last service on August 31, 2025 after the parish merged with Woodmar United Methodist Church. The merged parish has put the First United Methodist Church building on the market and are hopeful to find a buyer that will reuse the mid-century building.

Illinois

St. Simeon Serbian Orthodox Church

An architecturally complex structure featuring striking bands of yellow and red brick applied to traditional orthodox architectural forms, St. Simeon is an embodiment of diverse ethnic and religious influences rendered in a regional materiality and contextually appropriate scale. Established in 1968, it is what one scholar has called the “best example of Serbian ecclesiastical architecture in the United States.” Through its distinct aesthetic and annual Serb Fest, St. Simeon continues to serve as a collective source of Serbian identity in Chicago, even as those demographics become increasingly suburban.

St. Simeon’s construction epitomized an efflorescence of national church building that accompanied the century-long boom years in the steel industry, which was just starting to decline when it was built. For the first half of that period, German immigrants were the dominant group, but Slavic and other communities began to surpass them in the 1920s. For decades, work in lumberyards, meatpacking, steel mills, and factories dispersed immigrant communities across the region. These communities brought with them their faith, constructing ethnic parishes to shelter and minister to their spiritual needs when they were not laboring in the region’s dangerous and arduous industrial swork.

First Reformed Church
South Holland, IL

Founded in 1848 by Dutch immigrants, First Reformed Church is renowned primarily as one of the first in South Holland, and the largest – growing to over 800 congregants by the mid-1950s. One of the church’s founders, Jan Ton, was a local abolitionist, whose family owned a farm house and farm land nearby that was identified as a “safe house” on the Underground Railroad. Today, the congregation is a fraction of what it once was, but the church remains an important site in the Calumet Region’s history with connections to early Dutch immigrant communities and the Underground Railroad network.