The river reopened: the fish ladders and the hatchery

1970s — 1992 AND AFTER

For a century and a half the dams that made Mishawaka also walled the river; in 1991–92 the wall was pierced at Mishawaka itself: The St. Joseph River Trout and Salmon Project was created in the late 1970s by Indiana and Michigan together, to build a trout and salmon fishery on a river whose migratory fish had been stopped at its first dam since 1837. Its works on this ground came in order. In 1981 the American Electric Power Company signed a forty-year lease giving the Indiana DNR a 10.9-acre tract for a hatchery site; the Richard Clay Bodine State Fish Hatchery, on the east side of Mishawaka, was completed in 1983, and its charge is the release of coho salmon and two strains of steelhead trout — the most notable of them the Skamania strain — into the river. The passage works followed: the Mishawaka fish ladder, a staircase of slotted concrete-and-steel chambers climbing the historic Mishawaka overflow Dam at Central Park, was constructed in 1991. With the project's completion in 1992 — five ladders in all: Berrien Springs, Buchanan and Niles in Michigan; South Bend's at Seitz Park; and Mishawaka's — migratory fish could move freely through the lower sixty-three miles of the river, from Lake Michigan upstream to the base of the Twin Branch Dam, the one dam on the reach left unladdered, whose power course is Business and Industry's. The Department of Natural Resources watches the Mishawaka ladder with a motion-activated camera in a viewing window, and the public may visit and watch fish pass from above; no fishing is allowed within a hundred feet of the ladder's entrance or exit.

The project's civic frame was set alongside the ladders: in 1988 the Indiana legislature created the St. Joseph River Basin Commission to improve the river's water quality through planning and coordination among its governments — the cleanup era's institutional form, headquartered with the Michiana Area Council of Governments in South Bend. The river that the nineteenth century dammed for power and the twentieth used hard was, by the century's end, being managed as one water again; the Riverwalk entry below carries the same turn on the banks. This entry states the fishery facts at the strength of the agencies' own records; the river's industrial water history — intakes, wastes and the sewer course — is carried where the record puts it, in Business and Industry and the city government's own sections.

Sources:

1. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish & Wildlife — the Trout and Salmon Project's creation in the late 1970s; the five passage facilities completed in 1992; the Mishawaka ladder at Central Park; the sixty-three miles opened to the base of the Twin Branch Dam; the monitoring camera and the hundred-foot rule.
2. Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Mishawaka Fish Ladder marker (erected 2013) — the ladder constructed in 1991 at the historic Mishawaka overflow Dam; the 1981 AEP lease of 10.9 acres; the Bodine Hatchery completed in 1983; its coho and steelhead releases.
3. St. Joseph River Basin Commission — the commission's creation by the Indiana legislature in 1988; the ladder network as its founding context; its water-quality charge.