24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Cedar Lake, IN

Cedar Lake is a town in Hanover and Center townships in Lake County, in northwest Indiana near the Illinois state line, bordering the city of Crown Point.

The town takes its name from Cedar Lake itself, a natural lake of roughly 794 acres formed from glacial meltwaters that is the largest natural lake in northwest Indiana.

Pioneers settled the area in the mid-19th century, and the community was originally named West Point — the name 'Cedar Lake' originally belonged to the settlement that is now Creston.

In 1839 Cedar Lake competed with Liverpool and Lake Court House for the Lake County seat and lost.

The Cedar Lake post office was established in 1870, and the town was incorporated in the late 1960s.

When the Monon Railroad reached the lake's western shore in 1882, Cedar Lake became a popular resort retreat for visitors from Chicago, a role it kept into the early 20th century.

In the resort era, workers cut large blocks of ice from the frozen lake in winter and shipped them by rail to Chicago meatpacking houses such as Armour's, and ice-harvesting tools from that trade are still displayed in the town's lake museum.

The 2020 census counted 14,106 people in Cedar Lake, up from 11,560 people in 4,193 households in 2010 — growth of about 22 percent over the decade.

The Museum at Lassen's Resort, long known as the Lake of the Red Cedars Museum, occupies the historic Lassen Hotel; in the winter of 1919 the Lassen brothers moved the resort building across the frozen lake to its present site, and the expanded resort's grand opening on May 7, 1921 was echoed exactly 100 years later when the renovated museum reopened on May 7, 2021.

The Lassen Hotel and the Monon Park Dancing Pavilion in Cedar Lake are both listed on the National Register of Historic Places.