Diana of the Dunes lived in a shack called “The Wren’s Nest” located at the southwest corner of Tamarack and Shore Drive in Ogden Dunes from 1921 until 1925. She was a squatter, who built a shack near the beach and lived off the land all year around. Diana of the Dunes was the name given to Alice Mabel Gray by a newspaper reporter, who after seeing her success in shooting ducks, named her “Diana” after the Greco-Roman Goddess of hunters. Diana abandoned life in Chicago to live in the dunes in November 1915 at the age of 34. She spent the first winter in a teepee in the area of Dunes Acres. In the spring, she moved east of Ogden Dunes and rebuilt an abandoned shack out of the driftwood, lumber, and debris that washed up on the shore. Diana named this shack “Driftwood.”
Shortly after moving to the dunes, Diana wrote” … how wonderful, how unspeakably healing and sanctifying it has been living in all this beauty and this keenly vital air and in the blessed solitude.” Diana made some money by selling wild berries, including sand cherries, wild animals, and fish. In 1916, the Chesterton Tribune and other local and Chicago newspapers ran stories of this recluse who lived alone in the dunes, surviving off the land, bathing in the lake, and walking miles into the town of Porter for provisions. She was quoted in the Chicago Examiner as saying, “I wanted to live my own life – a free life. The life of a salary earner in the cities is slavery, a constant fight for making a living. Here it is so different.”
Diana began life in McKinley Park, Chicago, in 1881. She was very intelligent and well-educated. For six years, she worked part-time at the University of Chicago and attended classes to earn her degrees in mathematics, astronomy, Greek, and Latin. She was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. After college, Diana moved to Washington, D.C. to work for the U.S. Naval Observatory as a statistician. In 1906, she enrolled in the University of Gottingen in Germany to study mathematics. While in Germany, Diana learned of a movement called “Wandervogel”, where young people give up their material possessions to live off the land in nature. In 1908, she returned to Chicago and worked as a stenographer and an editor.
While living in Chicago, Diana loved coming to Indiana to hike the dunes with the Prairie Club. She appreciated the natural beauty of the dunes and loved learning about the native plants and animals. She wrote beautiful essays and poems about the dunes and Lake Michigan. On April 6, 1917, Diana spoke at the Art Institute in Chicago, promoting the Prairie Club’s Dunes Pageant to be held in the dunes at Waverly Beach on May 30 and June 3. Diana also read her essay “Chicago’s Kinland”, which described the dunes’ beauty, spiritual power, and the need to preserve this unique ecosystem in a natural state. Diana’s great appreciation of the dunes environment made her an iconic figure in the movement to save the dunes as a national park.
Diana’s family lived along Lake Michigan, a sister in Michigan City, and a brother in Long Beach. In 191,7 Diana met Paul Wilson, a local fisherman, furniture maker, and boat builder. They shared the love of a simple life, living off of nature’s bounty in the dunes. In 1921 Diana and Paul moved from the “Driftwood” five miles west to a shack they named “The Wren’s Nest.” The shack, built of drift lumber and roofed with tar paper, was one room with a fireplace and a chimney built of a tug boat stack. The ” Wren’s Nest” was located a half block from the beach, sheltered by a foredune and close to Polliwog Pond.
While living in the “Wren’s Nest”, Diana and Paul were neighbors with the Boy Scout and Girl Scout Camp called Camp Win-Sum, which was located south of the current water pumping station. Paul was hired by Camp Win-Sum to provide security when the camp was not being used. Diana and Paul would walk or oar or sail into Miller to sell the perch and other fish they caught and purchase provisions. Diana was a frequent visitor to the Public Library in Miller. She was a voracious reader, and wrote about the dunes, studied wildlife, and took children on tours of the dunes. In 1923, when Ogden Dunes, Inc. purchased 550 acres to develop into the town of Ogden Dunes, the realtor, Samuel Reck, hired Paul to take visitors out in his boats. Under construction at this time were the Dunes Highway, U.S. 12 connecting Chicago to Michigan, and the Burns Waterway connecting the Little Calumet River with Lake Michigan. In 1924, roads were being constructed in Ogden Dunes so lots could be sold and homes could be built. Diana and Paul felt civilization was intruding on their quiet life in nature, so they decided to move to Texas by taking their boat down the Mississippi River. Within a few months, they returned from Texas and moved back into the “Wren’s Nest.” In November of 1925, Diana, at the age of 44, tragically suffered kidney failure and passed away at the “Wren’s Nest.” She is buried in the Oak Hill Cemetery in Gary. Diana is remembered as a nature lover who wanted the dunes along Lake Michigan protected in their natural state.
Diana’s description of the dunes and Lake Michigan expresses beautifully this magic place ” I love the great silent darkness up there, the silence that lives in the noise of the winds and water, the darkness that finds itself in the fleeting, eternal waves of those reaches of waste sand; the only reality of life for me is there.”
