Harris Township Park at Brummitt Road: the elder park

10650 BRUMMITT ROAD · THIRTY ACRES · IN THE RECORD FROM THE PLAYGROUND ERA FORWARD

The elder of the township's two parks is a thirty-acre ground near Brummitt and Beech Roads, in the middle of the designated place: "Harris Township Park at Brummitt Road offers 30 acres of land, playing fields, wildlife habitats and a new pavilion," the trustee wrote in August 2022, the pavilion new at that writing. The park is kept as much habitat as ground — its own description in the trustee's and the township's records runs to fields, trail, and wildlife habitat together — and its back fields are leased to the Echo soccer club, whose course on the ground belongs to the Sports leg. The park's furniture carries its civic texture, on the trustee's October 2018 account as the Sports leg carries it: an Eagle Scout candidate, Eric Baker, designed and installed seating by the playground and soccer fields; Granger Community Church's #4Michiana volunteers mulched the playground and planted a hundred trees; and the PHM teacher John Gensic planted another hundred trees there with Penn High School students. The directory record fixes the ground at 41.734176, −86.075023. In the trustee's telling the two parks divide the work between them: Elm Road is the built park, courts and playground; Brummitt Road is the green one, whose second purpose after play is habitat — the ground where the township's plantings went in by the hundred.

The park's one named thing is its playground, and the name is printed here exactly as the record gives it, in both its spellings: the trustee's own Granger Gazette account of August 2022 calls it "the Sue Dytewski playground, which has been around for two decades" — dating the playground, by his memory, to about 2002 — while this build's Government leg, working from the township's published course, prints the name "Sue Dylewski." The two spellings stand unmerged; the record reached carries nothing further about who Sue Dytewski was, and the naming is entered in the closing roll as a named gap, with the township's board minutes and the playground's own dedication record named as its settlers. The park's own opening date and the origin of its thirty acres — when the township took the ground, and from whom — are likewise not fixed in any record; the park's documented life in print runs from the playground era forward, and the gap is registered below with the county parcel and deed record named as its settler.

Sources:

1. Granger Gazette, August 2022 (Lindsay) — the thirty acres, playing fields, wildlife habitats, the new pavilion, and the Sue Dytewski playground's two decades, in the trustee's own spelling.
2. Granger Gazette, October 2018 (Lindsay), as carried in this build's Sports leg — the Eagle Scout seating, the church volunteers' mulch and hundred trees, the Gensic planting.
3. The Government leg of this build — the township's park course, printing the playground's name as "Sue Dylewski"; the conflict is preserved, not resolved.
4. The Sports leg of this build — the Echo lease of the back fields and the park as athletic ground.