New Buffalo Railroad Museum

Now operating as the Harbor Country Museum of History + Rail, the institution formerly known as the New Buffalo Railroad Museum preserves the past of the greater New Buffalo area — a story bound up with the railroad from the start. New Buffalo was settled after sea captain Wessel Whittaker, shipwrecked on the Lake Michigan shore in 1834, bought land at the Galien River's mouth and named the harbor town for his home port of Buffalo, New York. When the Michigan Central was pushed across the state in the late 1830s, its line terminated at New Buffalo for several years, and passengers waiting for steamers to Chicago fueled explosive growth and a hotel boom; the boom ended once rails reached Chicago directly and New Buffalo became just another stop. The town reinvented itself as a train-accessible vacation getaway for Chicagoans, the lakeside identity the museum interprets today.