Harbor Country: where Carl Sandburg wrote Lincoln among the goats

Chikaming Township’s string of lakeside villages — Lakeside, Harbert, Union Pier, Sawyer — has been Chicago’s bohemian backyard for over a century. That’s long enough that the region earned its own name: Harbor Country. Writers and artists started arriving in the early 1900s, and the habit never broke. Today the stretch of Red Arrow Highway through the township is galleries, antique barns, bakeries, and inns, two minutes from uncrowded Lake Michigan beaches.

The most famous resident set the tone. Carl Sandburg lived on a dune top in Harbert from 1928 to 1945. There he wrote much of “Abraham Lincoln: The War Years,” the biography that won him the 1940 Pulitzer Prize. Meanwhile his wife Lilian built a nationally famous herd of prize dairy goats on the property. A Pulitzer upstairs and champion goats in the yard: that’s still a fair summary of Harbor Country’s whole sensibility. Serious art, unserious airs. Add Warren Woods’ old-growth forest on the township’s inland side, and you can see why Chicago money keeps trying to buy the place — and why the locals mostly just smile and stay put.