Walking Before There Were Trails: The Naturalist Culture

Before any ground in this county was a designated trail, it was a field trip. The naturalist culture that preceded the trails has a name and a date at its head: Father Julius A. Nieuwland of the University of Notre Dame — chemist, and in his other vocation the county's botanist — who documented the bog flora of the Chain Lakes country in the 1910s, recording the Rannoch-rush in the tamarack bogs there; the Community Foundation of St. Joseph County's account dates his documentation of Lydick Bog to 1912. Nieuwland's bog is the culture's whole parable: a place known to science in 1912, lost to print for a century, and found again in 2014 when the authors revising Plants of the Chicago Region asked the state botanist, Scott Namestnik, whether the Rannoch-rush still grew in St. Joseph County — and the bog came back into the record with a land trust behind it, as the next entries tell. Around that scholarly line stood the popular one the county still remembers: the school field trip as an institution — the College Football Hall of Fame generation's teachers walking classes out to the river and the bogs — and, at the county's south end, the culture's citizen form entire: Darcy Worster of Potato Creek, the self-taught naturalist who spent thirty years petitioning the state to dam his creek, sending hand-crafted insects made of maple seeds and acorns to legislators to "bug" them into remembering — the campaign that made the state park the ring entry below records. In Mishawaka itself the culture's surviving carrier is institutional: the Res, the city's own nature preserve ground, where the parks department's nature programming runs the field-trip line today. The entry's finding is the succession itself: first the naturalists walked and named, for a century, without a single designated trail; the trails, when they came, were laid on ground the naturalists had already made legible.