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The land trust that holds ground in this county is the Shirley Heinze Land Trust, and its founding is told here as a founding, as the checklist requires. The trust began in 1981 as the Shirley Heinze Environmental Fund, seated in Michigan City, and grew into the land trust of Indiana's northwest: more than 4,000 acres protected across Lake, Porter, LaPorte, St. Joseph, Starke and Marshall counties, its preserves running from dune to bog. Its St. Joseph County course is a single holding, and it prints whole. Lydick Bog — 176.46 acres of sphagnum bog, tamarack and upland forest west of South Bend on US 20, in German Township — was acquired by the trust in 2015, its first project outside the three lake counties, bought with partners the trust names: the Indiana Bicentennial Nature Trust, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, The Conservation Fund and NIPSCO among them. The state dedicated it a nature preserve in 2019. The holding then grew: ninety-three acres added under a $250,000 conservation easement bought by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources' Next Level Conservation Trust, with St. Joseph County's American Rescue Plan funds and the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County in the project, and the improvements — the elevated boardwalk balancing access against the bog's fragility, a pavilion, an added mile of trails — were cut open at a ribbon-cutting in May 2026, the trust's forty-fifth year. The new trail work links the bog west to Pine Road and east into the Indiana Dinosaur Museum's trail system, a private museum's paths joined to a preserve's. The trust's county string is thus one preserve long — the checklist's corridor form prints at its true size: a land trust whose county presence is a single, exemplary holding, the bog two naturalist generations fought to keep, held now in perpetuity by the region's trust.