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1837–1903 · St. Joseph County reach of the St. Joseph River; Juday Creek tested against the national and state rolls
Mishawaka's first dam, 1837. The Indiana Historical Bureau marker at Race and First Streets, Mishawaka (marker 71.1968.1; HMdb gives 41°39.752′N, 86°10.676′W), records: "The original dam, providing power for which Mishawaka was noted, was completed in 1837. It was 577 feet long, 24 feet thick and cost $38,000.00." Along the race it fed, early Mishawaka's factories lined up — flour, lumber, woolen goods, iron, boots, shoes, furniture, coffins, barrel staves, saddles and harness, wagons. An earlier attempt belongs to the same site-complex: the St. Joseph Iron Works tried a dam at Twin Branch in 1835, before the 1837 dam was completed (see below).
The South Bend dam — two dates, printed whole. Knoblock (1925) dates the South Bend dam to 1844: built by the South Bend Manufacturing Company, with the navigation lock on the west side at the foot of Washington Street (art-74-4). The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' National Inventory of Dams record for the South Bend Dam (NID IN00807), as carried in the NID-derived listings, dates its structure "completed in 1850": a timber-crib dam, 12 feet tall, 435 feet long, 800 acre-feet of storage on a 150-acre surface, drainage area 3,572 acres [as printed], hydroelectric, owned by local government (the City of South Bend), FERC-regulated, low hazard potential, inspected every three years, last inspection September 23, 2019. The two dates are not reconciled here: the 1844 dam is the lock dam of the navigation record; the 1850 date is the year-built of the structure the national inventory carries. Both stand as their sources give them.
Twin Branch Dam, 1903. The tallest hydroelectric dam on the St. Joseph River in Indiana stands at Twin Branch, Mishawaka. It was commissioned February 26, 1900 by the St. Joseph and Elkhart Power Company, built by Sanderson and Porter of New York City, first called Hen Island Dam, and it opened in 1903 — power was first produced December 16, 1903 — connecting to the Elkhart Power Company late that year. Charles A. Chapin bought the South Bend Electric Company interest for over $1,000,000 in 1904; the property merged with Indiana and Michigan in 1907 and has been owned and operated by American Electric Power / Indiana Michigan Power since 1922. The structure is gravity, timber-crib, and earth, capable of 2,600 kW.
The low-head roll for the county reach. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Low Head Dam Roster carries exactly two dams for St. Joseph County, both on the St. Joseph River: State ID 71-1, "South Bend," on the St. Joseph River at E. Jefferson Blvd. (upstream side), owner the City of South Bend; and State ID 71-2, "Ball Band," on the St. Joseph River at Cedar Street (upstream side), Mishawaka, owner Edge Water LLC. Elkhart Dam is the upstream boundary structure: NID IN03010, a gravity dam built 1903, 25 feet tall, 309 feet long, 3,300 acre-feet of storage on a 512-acre surface, hydroelectric, public-utility owned, FERC-regulated, high hazard potential, last inspection September 30, 2020.
The printed negative. No dam stands on Juday Creek, and the negative is printed from the two rolls that would have to carry one. Juday Creek appears in neither the National Inventory of Dams nor the IDNR Low Head Dam Roster; the roster's whole St. Joseph County list is the two main-stem dams above. Searches for a Juday Creek dam returned no dam record. One aggregator page (Snoflo's Juday Creek summary) asserts "no major dams on the creek, but it does have several small weirs" — the weirs are named and located in no source found, and the assertion is printed here as unverified, not adopted. The 1993–94 USGS sediment study of the creek (WRIR 95-4135) and the 1997 Warren restoration record mention an "instream pond" on the Grape Road reach — a pond, not a dam. The claimed-second-dam test therefore closes as follows: on the county reach of the St. Joseph, the dams are the 1837 Mishawaka dam and its race, the South Bend dam (1844 in the navigation record, 1850 in the national inventory), Twin Branch (1903), Ball Band, and the Elkhart boundary dam; on Juday Creek there is no dam, and none is claimed by any roll.
One wrong-river trap is dispelled in passing: the National Inventory also carries a "St. Joseph River (In-Channel) Dam," NID IN00811 — in Allen County, on the other St. Joseph River, the Maumee tributary (art-74-1): concrete, built 1933, 10 feet tall, 225 feet long, water supply, IDNR-regulated, significant hazard, condition fair as of April 2018. It is not a dam on this river and not a second dam on this reach.