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Clay and Harris townships · the tributary inventory, including the culverted and converted reaches
Juday Creek is Granger's principal water, and the record already carry it whole; the working detail assembled here sits alongside that record without re-litigating it. The banked length-and-basin conflict stands as printed in the fragments: 19 km long with a drainage area of approximately 98 km² (the Notre Dame BIOS 21202 course record and Shirey et al. repeat those figures; the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative's 2013 account calls it a "12-mile creek," which is the same length in the other unit, 19 km being 11.8 miles). It is a groundwater-fed, third-order tributary of the St. Joseph River (Shirey et al.: 41°42′N, 86°13′W, elevation 206 m), rising in farm fields in Granger, meandering west across the Grape Road corridor and the Warren Golf Course at Notre Dame, through South Bend neighborhoods, to its confluence with the St. Joseph River at the Izaak Walton League property (Notre Dame ECI, 2013). It holds naturally reproducing trout — the cold groundwater is the reason — in a county where that is a rarity.
Juday's legal identity is as important as its course: it is classified as an open drain — a regulated drain under the St. Joseph County Drainage Board. The Notre Dame ECI account puts it plainly: "officially it's a drainage ditch and under the jurisdiction of the (St. Joseph County) Drainage Board," with County Surveyor John McNamara quoted to the same effect. The Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute's case study traces the reclassification to the state's 1889 drainage law: Juday was reclassified as a drainage ditch instead of its historic designation as a creek, and dredging, wood removal, and mowing of buffer zones under drain maintenance disconnected it from its historical channel. The watershed's wetlands fell from 37 percent of the basin in 1829 to under 1 percent by 2000. Against that course, the Juday Creek Task Force and its management plan (in place by 1995, per the Michiana Area Council of Governments fact sheet) set a gentler maintenance regime for this one drain: only tree-limb removal, no dredging, unlike other regulated drains in the county.
The creek's one great modern reworking is dated 1997. When the Warren Golf Course was built at Notre Dame, a new channel was dug for Juday Creek through two wooded areas — a deliberate "re-meandering" — while the old channel was diverted and converted into a golf-course water feature that recycles water through pumps, visible along the third and fourth holes; the restoration was completed in 1997 (University of Notre Dame, "Finding the Sweet Spot"). Shirey et al. (2016, Ecology and Society 21(3):11) fix the restored reaches (R1/R2) against unrestored reaches (U1/U2) in Township 38 North, Range 3 East, section 30, bordered by Ironwood Road on the east and Interstate 80/90 on the north, with discharge taken from USGS gauge 04101370 for October 1, 1992 – October 1, 2013 — the same gauge whose flood series is printed at art-74-9.
Willow CreekThe U.S. Geological Survey's GNIS places a Willow Creek in St. Joseph County at 41.67060°N, 86.15278°W, with Mishawaka the nearest place, 0.7 miles away (TopoQuest's GNIS rendering). The Indiana Department of Environmental Management's St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan) Watershed TMDL (U.S. EPA-approved July 21, 2004) names the watershed's major streams as the St. Joseph River, Auten Ditch, Eller Ditch, and Willow Creek, in a watershed of about 137 square miles across St. Joseph and Elkhart counties, surveyed September 27 – October 26, 2000. The Michiana Stormwater Partnership's receiving-waters map lists Willow Creek under the St. Joseph River watershed, City of Mishawaka. Willow Creek's newest chapter is industrial, and it is dated November 2026: the St. Joseph County Drainage Board approved temporary dewatering pumping of up to 200,000 gallons of groundwater per hour from the 929-acre Microsoft data-center construction site in Granger into Willow Creek and Juday Creek — three wells pumping at different times, monitoring around nearby wells not yet finalised as of that report (Hoodline, November 3, 2026) — with the campus planned at six buildings, Mishawaka municipal water for domestic needs, and closed-loop cooling. One caution is printed with the inventory: a second Willow Creek, a tributary of Cedar Creek in DeKalb and Allen counties (with a Willow Creek Ditch and Willow Creek Branch), exists in the Maumee-side system. It is not this creek. The Granger Willow Creek is the St. Joseph County stream at the coordinates above.
Sheffield Creek is the buried-and-converted exemplar, already carried in the banked set: a named creek "converted into a great state ditch" — the culverted reach of this inventory is a creek that survives as a ditch name and a drainage course rather than as open water. Auten Ditch and Eller Ditch complete the named inventory at the watershed's edge: both are named as major streams of the same IDEM TMDL watershed, ditch-named waters of the regulated-drain landscape that Juday and Sheffield also belong to.
The inventory's one named gap is printed as a gap. The St. Joseph County Drainage Board's regulated-drain list itself — the official roll that would certify every named drain and ditch inside the CDP, reach by reach — was not retrievable on the open web: searches for it surfaced other counties' regulated-drain pages (Hamilton County, Allen County) and no St. Joseph County list. The gap is named: the complete regulated-drain inventory for Clay and Harris townships, with each drain's culverted reaches, is settled by the St. Joseph County Drainage Board / County Surveyor's regulated-drain list, read with Hellenthal's Juday Creek studies (1978– ) for the Juday basin. The creeks and ditches above are dug from GNIS, the IDEM watershed record, and the Juday literature; the county's own drain roll remains the settling source for completeness.