The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The St. Joseph County Chapter of the Izaak Walton League of America is one of the league's oldest chapters, and it stands here at full size as the checklist directs. The national league was founded in 1922 to defend the country's waters and woods; the county chapter was chartered in January 1924, two years in. Its grounds are at 20400 Darden Road in South Bend — the chapter moved to the Darden site in 1938 — a Juday Creek property whose size the record gives in two forms, printed whole: the chapter's own account puts its grounds at over 130 acres, while the Tribune's centennial account of April 2024 gives about 100 acres, half of it city-owned under a fifty-year lease renewed in 2000 and half purchased from Indiana Michigan Power in 1950. The chapter marked its centennial in April 2024, and its keeping runs past its own fence: it maintains the public St. Joseph River access north of Cleveland Road, conservation as a public work. The Mishawaka line is the chapter's frame: there is no Mishawaka chapter — the county's Waltonians are one chapter, seated on South Bend ground, holding county ground, and Mishawaka's anglers and hunters have belonged to it across the line for a century. The rest of the conservation clubs — the waterfowl and upland organizations' county chapters and the sporting clubs of the clubs fragment's roster — stand at pointer size, labeled as pointer: their records are their national bodies' and their banquets', and the full-size treatment the checklist reserves for the chapter with a century and a grounds is spent, here, on the Izaak Walton League alone.