Darcey Worster’s dream

North Liberty, Ind. Darcey Worster had a way of getting attention. A self-taught naturalist from North Liberty, he made little insects out of acorns and hickory nuts and mailed them to politicians. He “bugged” them, as one local history puts it, about a lake.

He had grown up walking the woods along Potato Creek, and in the 1930s he began saying the creek should be dammed. People told him the wet ground would never hold a dam. He kept at it for forty years. He died in 1974, three years before the lake was filled, and it carries his name. This is the second of three parts: how the farms became a park.

A dream in the 1930s

DocumentedThe park’s brochure says that “Darcy Worster and fellow conservation club members first proposed a man-made reservoir on Potato Creek in the late 1930’s. World War II halted the project.” Margie McCaig’s Indiana Parks Guide of 1988 puts the start in “the depression years of the early 1930’s,” and adds that “many people at that time protested the idea, claiming that the underlying soil of Potato Creek was unsuitable for dam construction.”

ReadingThe two dates fit together. Shenneman gives the one firm event: “in the spring of 1939, county and US Army engineers toured the site, and the Indiana Department of Conservation decided that Worster’s dream would become a reality,” with Works Progress Administration labor lined up to build it, before the war stopped everything. Worster seems to have started talking in the early 1930s; the project became real in 1939.

DocumentedWorster answered with research of his own. Franklin Shenneman, in his history of southern St. Joseph County, writes that “no one believed that the often-saturated soil could sustain a lake,” but that Worster, “a self-taught naturalist,” did his own studies to show it could. And he kept the idea alive, the park says, “by sending his hand-crafted insects to state officials.”

DocumentedNew findingHis name is spelled two ways: Darcy in the park’s older brochures and many guides, Darcey in Shenneman and the current brochure. The state’s own plaque at the lake, put up for the dedication of 1977, reads “In memory of Darcey Worster 1893–1974,” and so did his neighbors: the North Liberty column of the South Bend News-Times spells it Darcey in item after item from 1916 to 1925, though one item of 1920 has “Darcy R.” Those items fill in a little of the man. He was married by the end of 1916; in the summer of 1917 he passed the examination for the Navy’s engineering department and was sent to Norfolk, Virginia, and in March 1918 he came home on furlough as an engineer on the Vermont. In January 1920 “Darcy R. Worster” went to Detroit, the paper said, “where he is employed as detective for the Wabash railroad.”

ReadingWas he of the old Worster family? A Worster had been in North Liberty since 1852, when Anson Worster the wagon maker came to help build the mill. The newspaper items point to Darcey as a son of Anson’s son Parcellus, the village builder: in 1918 his wife was visiting “at the Worster home” while Parcellus’s daughter Mary was home visiting her parents, and in 1925 “Darcey and Mary Worster visited with George Hewish at Indiana Harbor,” the husband of Parcellus’s daughter Jessie. That would make him the wagon maker’s grandson. No record we have found says so in so many words.

The state chooses North Liberty

DocumentedThe idea came back after the war as a flood-control and recreation project. In December 1964 the Indiana Flood Control and Water Resources Commission published a preliminary report on a “Potato Creek Reservoir,” and a natural-areas survey of 1969 says a “new Potato Creek State Recreation Area was proposed in 1964.” Former Governor Matthew Welsh counted Potato Creek among the parks that came out of his administration’s planning under the Natural Resources Act of 1965. Shenneman writes that in 1966 the state announced it had selected North Liberty for the new park, and the same survey records a department announcement in the newspapers on 23 March 1968. The park’s brochure says that in 1969 “the area was designated to become a park.”

DocumentedThe 1969 survey describes the plan. The lake, for “recreation, flood control and water supply,” would lie “on both sides of present Osborn Road,” and its eastern end would come within half a mile of Orange Road. The authors asked the state to set aside an old-growth woods and a bog in the northeast corner of the park as a natural area, and noted that a dedication was being planned there. Part 3 tells what became of them.

“without his untiring efforts the preservation of this recreation area would not have been possible.”

The farmers who said no

DocumentedNot everyone wanted a lake. “Farmers who had acquiesced to the idea of donating a portion of their farmland in the 1930s,” Shenneman writes, “now vehemently opposed the idea,” arguing that other sites would take less farmland from people who depended on it for a living. There were fears, too, that the area would be commercialized.

DocumentedWithin a few months of the 1966 announcement the first owners began selling to the state. “Many early sellers were in support of the state’s buyout; others fought to the very end. Some landowners took the State of Indiana to court and eventually won judgments and received more money.” By the early 1970s some holdouts were still in court. Shenneman says the state had all 3,840 acres by 1972, at a cost of $5.7 million for land and development, though a park marker says the last family did not leave until 1978. The department began tearing down houses in the early 1970s; one photograph Shenneman reproduces shows the Fullmer family home meeting “its end by way of a bulldozer.”

DocumentedThe Department of Natural Resources is frank about this chapter of its history. “Creating a new park required landowners to donate or sell their land,” it writes of the parks built after the Second World War. “In some instances, land was taken from unwilling owners,” who “were paid for their land, but had to leave their homes.”

ReadingIt is worth remembering what was lost. The families on these farms had been there since the 1830s and 1850s. The Shupperts had held their land for well over a century. A park that hundreds of thousands of people now enjoy was built on the end of their farming lives, and the markers the park has put up along its trails are, in part, a way of paying that debt.

The dam and the lake

DocumentedThe dam that made the lake is an earthen bank 42 feet high and 1,500 feet long, finished in 1977. The National Inventory of Dams lists its drainage area as 11.8 square miles and its normal storage as 3,220 acre-feet. The lake behind it, Worster Lake, covers 327 acres. Potato Creek flows in at one end and out at the other, and goes on west through North Liberty to the Kankakee.

DocumentedDarcey Worster did not see it filled. He died on 11 November 1974, at eighty-one. His obituary, Shenneman writes, called him the “Father of Potato Creek.” That year the legislature set aside $2.5 million for the park, later cut to $2 million.

Dedication day

DocumentedOn 6 June 1977, “an unseasonably cool day,” Governor Otis R. Bowen dedicated the park in front of the new beach house. The six square miles, 3,840 acres, became Potato Creek State Recreation Area, and Bowen announced that the reservoir would be named Worster Lake.

DocumentedNew findingFor a few years it was officially a recreation area rather than a park. The department’s own publications called it Potato Creek State Recreation Area in 1979, 1981 and 1982. In 1983, McCaig’s guide explains, “the State Recreation Area classification was dropped,” statewide; the department’s brochure for Ouabache, another recreation area, says “In 1983, it became Ouabache State Park.” Potato Creek became a state park the same way. Local accounts credit State Representative Richard “Dick” Mangus of Lakeville with overseeing the change.

DocumentedNew findingDedicated is not the same as open. Shenneman’s chapter introduction says the park opened to the public in August 1978, though it gives the dedication as 1978 too, against his own photograph caption, both plaques and every other source. A school newscast written in early 1978, after the great blizzard, bears him out on the opening: two junior-high reporters interviewed the assistant manager of “the Potato Creek State Recreation Area” and asked, “When will the park be officially opened to the public?” and when the gate fee would start. Eight months after the dedication, it was not yet open. The likeliest reading: dedicated 6 June 1977, opened to the public in 1978.

“When will the park be officially opened to the public?”

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

• 1893 Darcey Worster born
• 24 years later
• 1917–18 Worster an engineer in the Navy
• 1930s Darcey Worster and a conservation club propose a lake on Potato Creek
• 1939 Spring: engineers tour the site; the state says yes; the war stops it
• 25 years later
• 1964 State flood-control commission report on a Potato Creek reservoir
• 1966 The state selects North Liberty; land sales begin
• 1968 Department announcement, 23 March
• 1969 The area designated to become a park
• 1974 Swamp Rose Nature Preserve dedicated; Worster dies, 11 November
• 1977 The dam completed; park dedicated, 6 June, and the lake named Worster Lake
• 1978 Opened to the public
• 1983 State park, when the recreation-area class is dropped

If you go

DocumentedThe beach house where Governor Bowen spoke stands on the lake’s shore, with Worster’s plaque on its boulder nearby, and the paved bicycle trail, 3.3 miles long, is an easy way to see the lake. Another 1977 dedication plaque hangs at the park office.