By Angel Gochee-Goins, Chair, Friends of Indiana Dunes
The displays at the Indiana Dunes State Park’s (IDSP) Nature Center are enjoyed by more than 110,000 visitors each year, and many of those visitors are children under the age of ten. In discussion with the Friends of Indiana Dunes (FRIENDS), the park’s interpretive naturalist Rebecca Hughes suggested adding a child-friendly interactive activity to the already-exceptional J.D. Marshall exhibit. This exhibit interprets the actual J.D. Marshall shipwreck that is located only 600 yards off Lake Michigan’s shoreline near The Pavilion and the state park beach. The site became Indiana’s first underwater state-dedicated nature preserve in 2013.
In 2025, the FRIENDS applied for and received an Indiana Parks Alliance (IPA) Small Project Grant Program to be used to “Create a Kid-Friendly Underwater Exploration of the J.D. Marshall Shipwreck” exhibit in the nature center. The goal was to have the project completed by September 2025 for the IDSP Centennial Celebration. With $800 from IPA and matching funds from the FRIENDS, IDSP was able to purchase a high-resolution monitor, a DVD player, and a rug that mimics the floor of Lake Michigan to be placed within the crawl-through cutaway within the shipwreck exhibit. This monitor continuously plays an underwater dive video of the shipwreck created by the I.U. Center for Underwater Science. New signage to invite kids of all ages to experience the shipwreck was also purchased for the exhibit. Children can put on a FRIENDS/IDSP mock scuba vest, sit on the custom-made rug, and let their imagination go wild as they watch the playful cormorants and fish in the video explore the shipwreck with them. Thanks to IPA for helping the FRIENDS fund these interactive elements through the Tom Hohman Small Project Grant Program.
