Before the lake: the farms of Potato Creek

North Liberty, Ind. In 1849 the Indiana Gazetteer gave the stream one line: “Potato Creek, a mill stream in the southern part of St. Joseph, runs west into the Kankakee.” For more than a century after that it was a farm creek, a place to dip a line for trout, a stream that farm boys crossed on Pierce Road and Violet Road and the Osborn road.

“Potato Creek, a mill stream in the southern part of St. Joseph, runs west into the Kankakee.”

Today the creek runs into a lake of more than three hundred acres, through six square miles of woods, wetland and prairie that half a million people visit every year. Before there was a lake, there were farms, a free Black settlement, a country cemetery and a creek with an odd name. This is the first of three parts: the land before the park.

Ground the ice left

DocumentedThe ground under the park was made by ice. The county’s soil survey says the glaciers covered St. Joseph County about 15,000 years ago and finally retreated about 12,000 years ago, leaving till and outwash behind them. About two-thirds of the county drains not to Lake Michigan but south and west, into the Kankakee River and on to the Mississippi; Potato Creek is part of that western drainage.

DocumentedThe park’s own markers point out the evidence. Springs rise where the porous glacial outwash of “rock, sand, and gravel” meets a layer water cannot pass, and the farmers who cleared the fields left “fence rows and rock piles” of glacial boulders that can still be seen in the woods. The Naragon barn by the nature centre stood on footings of the same boulders until it was taken down in November 2025.

A creek with an odd name

DocumentedNew findingThe earliest printed description of the creek we have found is the line in Chamberlain’s Indiana Gazetteer of 1849. The earlier gazetteer of 1833 has no entry for it. The same 1849 page lists a second Potato Creek, a mill stream in Montgomery County near Crawfordsville, which has nothing to do with this one.

DocumentedThe name may have been in use earlier than that. Chapman’s county history of 1880 says that Alexis Coquillard of South Bend, appointed in 1840 to carry out a removal of Potawatomi people from the region, “established a rendezvous at Potato creek.”

DocumentedNew findingThe papers of 1840 itself tell it differently. Gen. Hugh Brady ran that year’s emigration from his headquarters at South Bend, and on 10 August he wrote from there that “Mr. Coquillard … leaves here in a few days in charge of an emigrating party.” The South Bend Free Press reported that the party was to leave “that place” on the 17th; of 536 people who set out, 526 were delivered west on 6 October. None of the 1840 records we found names Potato Creek, and the historian R. David Edmunds speaks of “the removal camp near South Bend.” Chapman’s rendezvous on the creek rests on Chapman alone.

DocumentedNew findingWhere did the name come from? The state park’s brochures say that the Potawatomi gathered a plant with potato-like roots along the creek, and that settlers’ English name for it, “wild potato,” became the creek’s name. We searched the nineteenth-century gazetteers, county histories and place-name books for that explanation, and the guidebooks of the 1980s and 1990s, and did not find it. The earliest form of it we have found is a 2005 student newspaper, which says the park “is named after potato-like roots,” followed by the Department of Natural Resources brochure of 2007.

DocumentedThere is an older story of this kind in Indiana, but it belongs to the other creek. The 1881 history of Montgomery County says its Potato Creek and prairie “took their name from the wild potatoes that then grew so luxuriantly in this slough.” The explanation may have travelled from one Potato Creek to the other.

ReadingIt is still a reasonable explanation, and there are two candidates. Chapman’s county history of 1880 records both growing here: the “ground nut,” a native climbing bean with strings of edible tubers, and the “wild potato-vine,” which “is occasionally found on woody hillsides.” The ground-nut grows in wet ground like the creek’s and was widely called “Indian potato.”

DocumentedA linguist has offered the other. William Bright’s Native American Placenames of the United States (2004), citing Michael McCafferty, gives this Potato Creek a reconstructed Miami-Illinois name, mihk-ohpina siipiiwi, “red-potato creek,” where the red potato is the wild sweet-potato vine. It is a scholar’s reconstruction, not a name anyone wrote down, and it is not Potawatomi. No recorded Native name for the stream has come down to us.

Settlers and sawmills

DocumentedThe park lies in Liberty Township. The first settlers came in 1833, near what became North Liberty, and the township was organized in 1837. Chapman says the settlers were “mostly of German ancestry, or what are called Pennsylvania Dutch,” and that they at first had to go all the way to Elkhart to get their grain ground. A grist mill went up in North Liberty in 1837 and a sawmill in 1839.

DocumentedThis was heavy timber country. Chapman wrote that “it was not till about 1850 that the work of grubbing and clearing began to be faithfully prosecuted,” and by 1880 five sawmills were running in the township. North Liberty was laid out by Daniel Antrim on 12 January 1836: Howard’s county history of 1907 prints the plat itself, “witness my hand, this 12th day of January, 1836,” surveyed by the county surveyor Tyra W. Bray, who held that office only until 1836. (Chapman’s 1837 is the year of the first store.) The village had nearly four hundred people by 1880; its only complaint, Chapman said, was “the lack of railroad facilities.”

DocumentedAmong the craftsmen of the village was Anson Worster, a wagon maker from Chautauqua County, New York, who came to North Liberty in 1852 to help build the township’s second grist mill. He and his wife helped organize the village’s Adventist church. Remember the name.

The farms on the ground

DocumentedThe families who farmed the land that is now the park are remembered on the park’s markers. Joseph Shuppert and his wife bought their land in 1835 at $1.25 an acre, and United Brethren meetings were held in their cabin. Their son Jacob bought the farm in 1885, and Jacob’s son Clinton, who kept a store at Olive Branch in the 1920s, sold it to the state. One marker says the family were “the last landowners to leave in 1978”; another says the farm was sold in 1968. Both may be true, a sale in 1968 and a family that stayed on, but we have not found the deed.

DocumentedCharles and Mary Schrader came from Germany in 1851 and bought 160 acres on Potato Creek. The farm had twelve springs and the family called it Springdale Farm. Its springhouse has been rebuilt on the old foundation by the Friends of Potato Creek, and visitors can find it on Trail 4. The Naragon family cleared eighty acres and built up a farm of five hundred. Their red bank barn, with beech and tulip-poplar beams joined by mortise and tenon, stood beside the nature centre for more than a century; the state judged it unsafe, and despite a campaign by the Friends of Potato Creek it was taken down in late November 2025. Its date is told two ways: 1889 on the park’s new marker, 1908, built by Charles Naragon, in the Friends’ letter and the news reports, which take it from Shenneman. Documents found in 2025 showed that the state’s historic-sites survey of 2000 had rated the barn a “contributing” building.

ReadingNew findingThat survey lists a barn in the park, “W. Boat Launch, Potato Creek State Park”: an English bank barn “built on side hill, with basement level facing lake and boat launch area,” with weatherboard and vertical board siding, a stone and concrete foundation, sliding doors on the hay level and sawtooth boards above them, once used for agriculture and rated “Contributing.” The record does not name it, but it fits what the 2025 reports describe, a barn in the park rated Contributing in 2000, so it is probably the Naragon barn. The surveyor dated it only “c. 1900,” which sits between the two dates and settles neither.

DocumentedIn spring the woods smelled of maple smoke. Six families ran maple sugar camps in the Potato Creek area, Shenneman writes: the Cullar, Kane, Naragon, Robertson, Schrader and Sheneman camps.

The park ground on the old maps

DocumentedNew findingThe park’s boundary is a plain rectangle, three miles by two: exactly six square-mile sections of the federal land survey, sections 23, 24, 25 and 26 of Township 36 North, Range 1 East, and sections 19 and 30 of Range 2 East. All six lie in Liberty Township. Laid over the atlas of 1875, they hold some forty farms: J. Shuppert and C. Shreader, the Schraders of the springhouse; J. and G. W. Guyer; H. and S. Mangus; M. F. Pagin’s 160 acres; L. M. Taylor’s; A. Rakestraw, J. Fryar, the Inmans, the Whartons, G. Prell and more. A schoolhouse stood at the northwest corner of section 30, just across the road from the cemetery.

ReadingThe sugar-camp names on the atlas, the Kane estate, the Shenemans, the Fulmers and the Summers, lie southeast of North Liberty, outside the later park. The camps Shenneman lists were in the Potato Creek area, not all on the park ground.

Three sawmills on the creek

DocumentedNew findingThe park brochure says only that “springhouses and mills dotted the area.” The county map of 1863 names them. On the park ground it shows three sawmills, each with its mill pond dammed across Potato Creek: one in section 23 on the land of Green and Redduck; one in section 25 on the forty acres of S. Gard, the Samuel Gard who in 1854 gave the ground for the cemetery that stands beside it; and one in section 30 on the farm of P. Walsmith. Twelve years later the atlas still marks two of them, in sections 23 and 25, with their ponds.

DocumentedNew findingThe last of those mills has a story attached. In 1927 the South Bend News-Times reported the sale of “the Waldsmith farm,” settled in 1838 by Peter Waldsmith: “The first saw-mill in St. Joseph county was built on Waldsmith’s farm on the banks of Potato creek,” and his son George ran it. Chapman says Waldsmith “settled on section 30.” The atlas shows no Waldsmith in the section 30 west of North Liberty, but the 1863 map puts P. Walsmith’s sawmill and pond in section 30 of the next range, inside today’s park; his larger tract lay just south, in section 31, and the “160 acre tract” sold in 1927 may have been that land. Peter Waldsmith, who died in 1873, is buried in Porter Rea Cemetery, a short walk from his mill pond.

DocumentedNew findingThe first of the three mills may be the oldest on the creek. The county atlas of 1875, in its short history of Greene Township, lists among the firsts: “First saw-mill on Potato Creek by John Green, Jr.” The same paragraph records that “the first death was that of Isaac Rudduck, Jan. 13, 1833,” and that the first couple married were “John Rudduck and Elizabeth Rupe.”

ReadingThe names fit the map. In 1863 the mill in section 23 stood on the land of “Green & Redduck,” a Jno. Green held land in the next section, and twelve years later the atlas seems to letter it “Rudduck” again. The atlas does not say where John Green Jr. built his mill or when, so it may not be the same one; Chapman, repeating the line in 1880, calls it “the first saw-mill in the township,” meaning Greene Township, and the section 23 mill lies in Liberty, so Green’s may have stood farther north, in Greene, and not on the park ground. But a Green and a Rudduck working a sawmill on Potato Creek, in the families of the first settlers, makes a connection likely.

ReadingThe partners of 1875 may be traced the same way. John Rudduck’s daughter Martha was the wife of George W. Garwood, Chapman says, and a G. W. Garwood farmed in the next section, so the mill’s firm was probably Rudduck and his son-in-law. The “E. Hoke” on Samuel Gard’s mill tract in section 25 was very probably Emanuel Hoke, whose son William, “lumbering for a number of years while young,” married Gard’s daughter Margaret in 1856. Neither is stated in any record; both are our reading of the names.

ReadingWhether his was the county’s first sawmill is another matter; other mills are older claimants, and the 1927 story was told eighty-nine years after the fact. But the mill pond and the grave are both on the park ground, and the farm lay at its edge.

DocumentedThe creek was worked hard. In 1917, during the great project to drain the Kankakee marshes, the South Bend News-Times reported plans for “a general cleaning out of ditches that empty into the Kankakee; as, the Kline ditch and Grape Vine, and Potato creek in St. Joseph county.” The park brochure says settlers “drained wetlands and straightened the creek bends.”

DocumentedNew findingEight years earlier two federal biologists had seen the creek as it was. Surveying the mussels of the Kankakee in the summer of 1909, Charles B. Wilson and H. Walton Clark found Potato Creek near Walkerton “8 or 10 feet wide, with the water nowhere more than a foot or a foot and a half in depth,” its bed “hard sand or gravel.” Being “undredged,” they wrote, “it still preserves those alternations of swift and sluggish current, deep and shallow water, coarse and fine bottom, which are conducive to mussel life,” and they counted nine species of mussels in it.

DocumentedNew findingIt was also a fishing stream. In June 1927 the News-Times reported that “through the efforts of the North Liberty Izaak Walton league 10,000 rainbow trout minnows were put in Potato creek.” Half a century later a federal report on the Kankakee basin still called Potato Creek in St. Joseph County “an extensively fished trout stream.”

The Huggart Settlement

DocumentedJust east of the park, in Union Township, lay one of the most remarkable communities in the county. The Huggart brothers, free Black men from Miami County, Ohio, entered land there in 1834; Samuel Huggart’s patent for eighty acres at $1.25 an acre is dated 20 March 1837. Other Black families, the Basses, Boones and Manuels, bought land nearby, and the settlement was farmed by its families from the 1830s into the 1890s. The historian Frederick Karst estimated its peak at about thirty people around 1880.

DocumentedThe Huggarts were part of the life of the township. Andrew Huggart was superintendent of the Olive Branch Sunday school, and the Huggart children went to the Olive Branch school with white children. When Andrew died in 1881, the South Bend Tribune called him “one of the most industrious and conscientious men we ever met” and “the first colored man to run for office in this county.” A state historical marker stands at State Road 4 and Mulberry Road.

“one of the most industrious and conscientious men we ever met”

Porter Rea Cemetery

DocumentedInside the park, enclosed by it but not part of it, is a small country cemetery. It was “officially created September 6, 1854 when Samuel Gard deeded land to trustees for a burial ground.” Free Black settlers from the Huggart Settlement, says the state marker of 2003, “were buried here alongside their white neighbors, not segregated,” and the cemetery association formed on 9 May 1884 had both white and Black charter members. (Other dates in print, 1888 and 1895, have no source we can find; the marker’s date comes from the association’s own articles.)

DocumentedNew findingThe articles themselves settle a small puzzle. The state’s dedication page labels its photograph of them “Articles of Association of Porter Cemetery – 1855,” which would put an association a year after Samuel Gard’s deed. But 1855 is the date of the law, not of the association: the members “associate together under the provision of an act of the Legislature of the State of Indiana approved Feb 12th 1855 and the amendments thereto,” cited by its chapter in the revised statutes, “for the purpose of providing a Cemetery for the burial of the dead” in section 25 of Township 36 North, Range 1 East, on the land “heretofore known as the Porter Grave Yard.” A law of 1855 cited through its later revision fits the marker’s 9 May 1884, and the articles name the association: “Porter Cemetery Association.”

DocumentedIt has been called Porter Rea for decades, the marker says, “perhaps because both Porter and Rea families owned adjacent land.” The maps bear that out: S. Porter held two tracts just east of the burying ground in 1863, and in 1875 the farm beside it belonged to W. Ray. The neighborhood also had a one-room schoolhouse, the Rea School; the schoolhouse on the 1875 map, across the road from the cemetery, may be it. The cemetery “remains an active independent cemetery,” managed by its own association. Despite what one visitors’ guide says, it is not on the National Register of Historic Places.

ReadingA cemetery where Black and white neighbors were buried side by side in the 1850s says a good deal about the community around it. When the state bought the farms in the 1970s, the cemetery stayed, and it is now the oldest piece of the landscape that people still use for its first purpose. The second part of this series tells how the farms became a park.

Story or record? Play along

Now that you have read the record, try these six. For each claim, make your call: true, false, or no record either way. Then see what the record says.

Questions we answered

A timeline

• 1833 First settlers near North Liberty
• 1834 The Huggart brothers enter land in Union Township
• 1835 The Shupperts buy their farm
• 1836 North Liberty laid out, 12 January
• 1837 Liberty Township organized; North Liberty’s grist mill
• 1838 Peter Waldsmith settles on the creek
• 1840 A Potawatomi emigrating party is to leave South Bend, 17 August
• 1849 The creek in the Indiana Gazetteer
• 1851 The Schraders buy 160 acres on the creek
• 1854 Samuel Gard deeds the cemetery ground, 6 September
• 1863 Three sawmills on the creek on the county map
• 21 years later
• 1884 Porter Cemetery Association formed
• 1889 or 1908 The Naragon barn built
• 28 years later
• 1917 Potato Creek cleaned out in the Kankakee ditch project
• 1927 10,000 rainbow trout put in the creek; the Waldsmith farm sold
• 98 years later
• 2025 The Naragon barn taken down, November

If you go

DocumentedPotato Creek State Park is at 25601 State Road 4, about three miles east of North Liberty. The springhouse is on Trail 4, the new farm markers, including one for the Naragon barn, are beside the nature centre, and the Huggart Settlement marker stands at State Road 4 and Mulberry Road. Porter Rea Cemetery is an active cemetery; please visit it with respect.