There are tales to be told about an area where important native habitats harboring rare plants and animals are situated right next to factories, where the fights for civil rights and workers’ rights as well as a World’s Fair captured the attention of the world.

It’s all fodder for a series of new exhibitions that highlights the importance of the people, culture and natural resources of the Calumet region.

“Calumet Voices, National Stories” was put together by organizers at the Field Museum in collaboration with historians and historical organizations throughout the region.

“People who live in the region and are proud of where they live will get to see what is of national significance about this place,” said Mark Bouman, Chicago region program director for the Field Museum.

The Calumet region stretches from Chicago’s Jackson Park — the site of 1893 Columbian Exposition, south to the eastern portion of Will County, west to the Blue Island and Robbins areas and east to Michigan City, Indiana. The exhibitions include artifacts and stories from 15 communities.

“It was fun to work collaboratively to tell these stories together,” Bouman said.

The exhibition series will be held in four different locations at different times through 2021. The first exhibition opened Friday at the Pullman Visitor Center, 11141 S. Cottage Grove Ave., Chicago. It runs through Nov. 17.

Bouman said work on assembling the exhibitions started in earnest about two years ago.

“This kind of partnership is a first for the Field Museum,” said Madeleine Tudor, applied cultural research manager at the Field Museum in a news release. “We wanted to showcase local organizations who hold much of the knowledge, artifacts, images and specimens that deepen understanding of the Field’s own collections from the Calumet region.”

Artifacts from the Blue Island Historical Society and the Robbins Illinois History Museum, such as Tuskegee Airmen gear, will be included in the exhibitions.

Among the items on loan from Blue Island are a community band drum from 1900, a Blue Island brewery glass bottle from 1890, several photos from the 1800s and a chunk of rail used during the construction of the Cal-Sag Channel, said Kevin Brown, director of the Blue Island Historical Society.

He said the exhibitions are part of of the Calumet Heritage Corridor partnership, which has been trying to gain Congressional recognition of the region’s historic importance for about 20 years.

Brown said the Calumet region includes several communities across Illinois and Indiana that share the same cultural aspects and the group is close to getting legislation passed that would nationally recognize it as an important historic area.

Bouman said the exhibitions are an extension of that partnership and proof of the region’s importance.

“It’ll be kind of fun to see it evolve and see how the stories shift over time,” Bouman said.

The second exhibition will open Jan. 20 at the Gary, Indiana, Public Library, and the third exhibition will open July 2020 at the Brauer Museum of Art at Valparaiso University.

The culminating exhibition will open in February 2021 at the Field Museum.

The first exhibition at the Pullman Visitor Center centers on the theme of fire, water and earth.

For example, Bouman said one part of the exhibition will try to give visitors an idea of how hot and hard it was working in the steel mills next to a blast furnace. The protective gear workers wore will be on display.

“It’ll include a description of what it was like to work in those conditions,” Bouman said.

He said the Calumet region was and is an important place in America with its once premier industrial sites alongside native wetlands and dunes.

Bouman said the region is a place where railroads, factories, pipelines, natural resources and people all are pressed together.

“It tells us a ton of how America developed,” he said.

Bouman said the exhibitions also will highlight the pitched fights for workers’ rights, racial tensions and parts of everyday life.

“By living everyday life people made this region great,” he said. “They made it nationally significant without thinking about it at the time.”

Frank Vaisvilas is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.