Town of Munster, IN history

Before the building burned in 1909, it housed a telegraph office and may have been used to protect runaway slaves, Martin says.

A ten-acre site between Columbia and Calumet on the south side of Ridge Road (now the site of the Center for Performing and Visual Arts) was chosen and construction began in 1914.

The formal dedication of the new Munster School in March, 1915, included speeches, songs, piano solos and even a student pantomime (according to Trustee info, this was its name). There were still only eight grades, but they now had four classrooms, a library, and an auditorium.

After 1920 growing numbers of commuters launched the suburban era.

In 1926, Ford bought about 400 acres in Illinois near Lansing and several hundred more acres in Munster for the airport and a factory to build his Ford airplanes.

In 1927 Burns Ditch minimized the annual floods of the Little Calumet and made north Munster habitable.

A wing of classrooms and a gymnasium were built in 1928.

By 1945 Munster was an uneasy mixture of small farmers, industrial workers, and well-to-do commuters.

Eads was built on Harrison Avenue in 1948 for students living west of Calumet Avenue.

The school was renamed Lanier School in 1950.

Elliott School, on White Oak Avenue, opened in 1952.

Wilbur Wright Junior High opened in 1960, and Lanier became an elementary school.

Wilbur Wright's first addition was built in 1963 and included two lecture halls and a resource center.

Designs were pared down and construction began on acreage on Columbia Avenue in June, 1965.

Munster High School opened in 1966 and curricula were developed to serve a largely college-bound student population.

It closed in 1980, leaving the Town of Munster with modern educational facilities: three elementary schools, a middle school, and a high school.

Long-empty South Munster filled with subdivisions; Don Powers, one businessman among many, had developed almost two thousand homesites by 1990.