Juday Creek: the ground's own water

THE RECORD TO THE PRESENT

The frame has one creek, and the record for it is unusually exact: Juday Creek is a groundwater-fed, third-order tributary of the St. Joseph River (Shirey and others, 2016). The research record gives it a length of 19 kilometres and a drainage of 98 square kilometres; the South Bend Tribune's account of 2013, carried by the University of Notre Dame's Environmental Change Initiative, calls it "the 12-mile creek" with a 14,700-acre watershed. The lengths agree — nineteen kilometres is eleven and eight-tenths miles — and the drainages do not: 98 square kilometres is about 24,200 acres. Both figures are printed as their records give them; the difference is not reconciled here, and it stands as the measure of two surveys of a small watershed. The creek rises in farm fields in Granger, in Harris Township, and runs west — across the Grape Road corridor, through the Warren Golf Course at the University of Notre Dame, and through South Bend neighborhoods — to join the St. Joseph River at the Izaak Walton League property: Clay Township ground and beyond for most of its course, Harris ground at its head, the whole of it the surface expression of the fan-and-outwash frame of the ice entry.

The federal survey's sediment study of 1993–94 (Water-Resources Investigations Report 95-4135) identifies Juday Creek as "one of the few streams in the State that can support a naturally reproducing brown trout population" — a cold-water fishery in a farm ditch, sustained by groundwater. Its bed material is predominantly sand and gravel with very little silt; the sediment yield of its upper reach measured 48 tons per square mile for April 1993 to April 1994. The Survey gauges the creek near its mouth (station 04101370). Legally the creek is not a creek at all: it is classified as an open drain, under the jurisdiction of the St. Joseph County Drainage Board — "officially it's a drainage ditch," as the Tribune's account puts it — and the county's program of stream "maintenance," begun in 1986, measurably increased its sediment load, as a Notre Dame capstone record of 2022 documents. In 1997 two 400-metre reaches of the creek were relocated and restored for the construction of the Warren Golf Course, in Section 30, Township 38 North, Range 3 East — Harris Township's southwest section — bordered by Ironwood Road on the east and the interstate on the north. In that reach the stream loses water to the ground (Booth, 1993; Silliman and others, 1995), while its lower course is fed largely by groundwater (Silliman and Booth, 1993): the creek sinks on the outwash and rises cold below, the glacial frame working in a single stream. The watershed's modern burden — the Douglas Road dump east of Grape Road, an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site whose remediation has aimed at keeping the wastes of the Mishawaka rubber works out of this creek — stands on Mishawaka's industry ground and is carried there; it is named here because the creek receives its drainage. Where the name Juday itself comes from, no source reached for this section says; the name is older than any explanation of it that the record reached contains.

Sources:

1. Patrick D. Shirey and others (2016), the Juday Creek restoration study (published in Ecology and Society) — the creek as a groundwater-fed, third-order tributary, 19 kilometres long draining 98 square kilometres; the 1997 relocation and restoration of two 400-metre reaches in Section 30, Township 38 North, Range 3 East for the Warren Golf Course; the reach losing water to the ground (Booth 1993; Silliman and others 1995) and the lower creek groundwater-fed (Silliman and Booth 1993); discharge from USGS gage 04101370.
2. U.S. Geological Survey, Water-Resources Investigations Report 95-4135 — Characteristics, Transport, and Yield of Sediment in Juday Creek, St. Joseph County, Indiana, 1993–94: the naturally reproducing brown trout population, the sand-and-gravel bed, the upper-reach sediment yield of 48 tons per square mile.
3. South Bend Tribune, 18 April 2013, as carried by the University of Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative — "the 12-mile creek," the 14,700-acre watershed, the course from Granger farm fields across the Grape Road corridor and the Warren Golf Course to the river, the classification as an open drain under the county Drainage Board, and the Douglas Road dump remediation.
4. University of Notre Dame capstone record (2022) — the county's stream maintenance from 1986 and the sediment increase that followed.