The park goes back to the wild

North Liberty, Ind. Two big nests of sticks sit on poles near Worster Lake. In spring their owners come back from the south, ospreys, the fish hawks that plunge feet-first into the water, and from the shore you can watch them hunt the lake that was farmland fifty years ago.

The farmers had spent a century draining this ground. The park has spent half a century letting it go wet again. This is the last of three parts: how Potato Creek went back to the wild, and what it holds now.

Swamp Rose

DocumentedThe wildest corner of the park was protected before the lake was even filled. Between May and October 1974 the Natural Resources Commission dedicated the Swamp Rose Nature Preserve, 100 acres (the state’s map today draws it at about 155) in the northeast corner of what was then the new recreation area. When a botanist from Indiana University South Bend, Victor Riemenschneider, surveyed it in 1975 and 1976, he found about forty hectares holding 256 species and varieties of plants in three habitats, forest, upland old field and wetland, and 62 species of birds.

DocumentedThe park describes it as a place to see “the eutrophic process,” the slow filling of open water with plants. A small stream begins in its wetland and flows into Worster Lake, and it is a favourite place of beavers. There is no trail into it today, though the state’s directory of 1981 says a hiking trail then wound through it.

DocumentedNew findingIt is half of what the naturalists asked for. The 1969 survey Natural Areas in Indiana and Their Preservation asked the state to save two things in the northeast corner of the planned park: a leatherleaf bog west of Oak Road, which it called New-Oak-Road Bog, and beside it the Inez Clingenspell Woods, “the only old-growth stand we located in this area.” In 1987 the state’s own nature-preserves staff checked what had become of every place in that book. Their table matches New-Oak-Road Bog to “Swamp Rose.” Clingenspell Woods is on their other list, of areas “severely degraded or destroyed.” The bog was saved; the old woods were not.

“the only old-growth stand we located in this area.”

Putting the wetlands back

DocumentedIn the early 1990s the park began what its brochure calls an active resource management program, aiming at something like the land of the early 1800s. “Today more than a square mile of the park is covered by wetlands and Worster Lake”: sedge meadows, shallow marshes, swamps and beaver ponds. Native prairie is being brought back with plantings and kept open with controlled burning, and other parts of the park are being allowed to grow back into hardwood forest.

DocumentedThe deer had other ideas. In 1993 and 1994 researchers studying fenced plots at Swamp Rose, Summer’s Pond and Pear Road found that browsing deer had a strong effect on spring wildflowers and young sugar maples. Richard B. Whittaker wrote a whole book about them, The Deer of Potato Creek, in 1986.

The birds

DocumentedIn 2006 the park was named an Important Bird Area, and it is on the Indiana Birding Trail. Visitors see sandhill cranes, great blue herons, kingfishers, wood ducks and pileated woodpeckers, and bald eagles hunt the lake. Ospreys nest on tall poles near the water, one of them next to the dam.

DocumentedOspreys were once rare in Indiana. The state released 96 young birds from Virginia between 2003 and 2006 at four of its properties, Jasper-Pulaski, Minnehaha and Tri-County fish and wildlife areas and Patoka Lake; Potato Creek was not among them. In 2018 the state took the species off the state endangered list; that year its biologists named Potato Creek among the places ospreys nest. The park’s 2026 brochure says it has had nesting ospreys “since before the species’ reintroduction in the early 2000s.” A wildlife guide of 1992 is more cautious: ospreys, it says, “are seen here occasionally.”

A champion in the statehouse

DocumentedMuch of what visitors use today came through one man in Indianapolis. Richard “Dick” Mangus of Lakeville sat in the Indiana House from 1972 to 2004 and then on the Natural Resources Commission. A marker in the park credits him with the cabins, trails, picnic areas, campgrounds, the nature centre and the interpretive naturalist service, and another notes that “one of Mangus’s goals for Potato Creek was an inn overlooking Worster Lake.”

What the park holds

DocumentedThe park covers 3,840 acres. It has six numbered hiking trails, from the easy one-mile Trail 5 to the “rugged” two-mile climb of Trail 2 to the park’s highest ground, plus the Friends Wetland Trail and the Peppermint Loop. There are 3.3 miles of paved bicycle trail, 7.5 miles of mountain bike trail, three bridle trails with a horsemen’s campground, a family campground, cabins open all year, a beach, and boat launches on the lake. In winter there is cross-country skiing, sledding and ice fishing.

DocumentedNew findingThe nature centre came with the park’s first big building program. The department’s guide for 1982 announced that “sometime this summer, four new picnic areas, a nature center/warming hut, and three picnic shelters will be opening,” with the first cabins on the north shore; the centre would serve in winter “as a cross country ski rental building.” The park then had seasonal naturalists only. Today the nature centre has a wildlife observation window and a full-time naturalist. In 2026 the department put up new markers beside it telling the story of the farms, where the Naragon barn stood until November 2025, and the Friends of Potato Creek have rebuilt the Schrader springhouse on Trail 4. About 570,000 people a year visit the park.

“sometime this summer, four new picnic areas, a nature center/warming hut, and three picnic shelters will be opening”

The lodge

DocumentedDick Mangus’s inn is finally being built. On 19 October 2023 Governor Eric Holcomb broke ground for the Lodge at Potato Creek State Park on the south shore of Worster Lake: 120 guest rooms, dining for 150, conference space for 350, an indoor aquatic centre and a small nature room. It is the first new lodge built in an Indiana state park since 1939. Its cornerstone was laid in December 2024. By September 2026 it was 65 percent complete and the cost estimate had grown from $100 million to about $113 million. The state parks director has said construction should be finished by late spring 2027, after which it must be furnished and staffed, so the lodge should open in 2027; the DNR’s inns page says only that “opening is targeted for 2027,” and no date or reservations have been announced.

ReadingIt is a long way from Darcey Worster mailing acorn insects to the statehouse. The lake he imagined in the 1930s will soon have a hotel on it. In 2027 the park will be fifty years old; the Shupperts held their land for well over a century, so the park has some catching up to do.

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

• 1969 Naturalists ask the state to save a bog and an old-growth woods
• 1974 Swamp Rose Nature Preserve dedicated, May–October
• 1975–76 First survey of the preserve: 256 plants, 62 birds
• 1977 Park dedicated, 6 June
• 1982 Nature centre and first cabins due to open
• 1986 The Deer of Potato Creek
• 1987 Clingenspell Woods listed as “severely degraded or destroyed”
• Early 1990s Wetland and prairie restoration begins
• 2006 Named an Important Bird Area
• 2018 Ospreys taken off Indiana’s endangered list
• 2023 Lodge groundbreaking, 19 October
• 2025 Naragon barn taken down, November
• 2026 New farm-history markers; the lodge 65 percent built
• 2027 The lodge expected to open; the park turns fifty

Test yourself

If you go

DocumentedPotato Creek State Park, 25601 State Road 4, North Liberty, is open all year. The nature centre is usually open Friday 11 to 5 and Saturday and Sunday 10 to 4; check with the park for current hours and programs. Bring binoculars for the osprey poles.