Every Sunday, Frank Virgil Dudley and his wife held an open house so that the public could view his work. He used his artistic talent to raise awareness of the dunes and to support the movement to make the area a national park. According to Dudley, the first event in the publicity campaign for the park was a pageant in 1917, featuring 800 actors and attended by an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 thousand people. “I felt I could do something in my own way that might help some, and so got very busy,” he told the Art Museum of Greater Lafayette. “In 1918 I put on a one-man show in the Art Institute [of Chicago] which was sponsored by ‘The Friends of Our Native Landscape’ and 20 other organizations that were interested in conservation.” In 1923 the Indiana Dunes State Park was established on 2,183 acres. In 1925, 2,200 acres were added, including 3.25 miles of frontage on Lake Michigan—thus saving part of what Dudley and others considered the most important primitive landscape in the Midwest. In 1966 the U.S. Congress established the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore in order to preserve this unique area. Dudley and his wife continued to live in cottage 108 after the creation of the park. His rental payment to the state consisted of one original oil painting of the dunes each year; he completed 19 paintings, which are in the collection of the Indiana State Museum.