Wait just a second.
I thought Vincennes had a national park?
That's the question locals are directing these days to Frank Doughman, superintendent of the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park.
“I've gotten several calls,” Doughman said. “They say, 'I thought you were a national park. How can the Dunes be (Indiana's) first?'
“And I tell them, 'It all comes down to designation.'”
Language retitling Indiana Dunes — a 15,000-acre park along the southern shore of Lake Michigan in northwestern Indiana — as a national park was included in the omnibus appropriations legislation signed into law by President Trump last week, making it, in fact, Indiana’s first national park.
But there are nearly 50 different categories of “national park” designated by the National Park Service, Doughman explained.
Previously, the Indiana Dunes, first established in 1966, was listed as a “national lakeshore” where as the local park is a “national historical park.”
“But we're all within the same National Park System,” Doughman said.
Other designations, he said, include “wild and scenic river” and “national battlefields” as well as both “historical parks” and “historical sites” and even “national memorials,” among many others.
The designation of national park, however, Doughman calls the “cream of the crop.”
“That title is reserved for the biggest, most diverse parks,” Doughman said. “Smaller sites like ours aren't supposed to have that designation.
“That's for the more expansive, national treasures, ones like Yellowstone, Yosemite, places like that.”
For many years, Doughman said the country had 54 national parks. The addition of Indiana Dunes as well as the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and the Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio and others in recent years have brought that up to 61.
Indiana, he said, has three national park sites, specifically the Dunes, the George Rogers Clark National Historical Park and Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial — classified as a “national memorial” — in Lincoln City.
The Clark Memorial was first constructed in 1931 but it and the land around it were not designated as a national historical park until 1966, the same year the Dunes was first designated as well.
Lincoln Boyhood had been established four years earlier in 1962.
Dunes' re-designation as a more recognizable national park doesn't, however, offer many, if any, additional perks, Doughman explained.
“It doesn't get any extra funding, and it doesn't get any more priority in terms of projects,” he said. “But what it does do is make it more recognizable as a national park. It gives the park authority and publicity.
“That's why that 'national park' moniker is so important to those parks that get it.”
Doughman, too, added that the Dunes was always on a path to being named a national park. It's a designation officials there have been after, he said, for more than 100 years.