The Ladder at Central Park, Counted

1991 to the present; the DNR's camera and the outdoors press

The ladder itself — the staircase of slotted chambers built in 1991 up the historic Mishawaka overflow Dam at Central Park — stands in the parks file as a work. Here it stands as a fish record: the top step of the reopened river, and the place where the river's new fauna is counted. With the project's completion in 1992, migratory fish could move through the lower sixty-three miles of the river from Lake Michigan to the base of the Twin Branch Dam in Mishawaka — the one dam on the reach left unladdered, so that Mishawaka holds both the last ladder and the wall above it. The DNR watches the Indiana ladders with a motion-activated video camera in a viewing window, in its own words, to "count the fish, study the timing and strength of fish runs, provide fishing reports to anglers, and evaluate the success of stocking programs." The published system count of the first full season — fall 1992, 3,403 fish at the South Bend dam, 99.6 percent of them the stocked salmonines — stands in South Bend's file; the Mishawaka ladder's documented count in the record reached is of a different, smaller kind, and it is printed at its strength: in a July week of the program's maturity, the outdoors press of record carried the Lake Michigan biologist's report that Bodine Hatchery workers had counted ten steelhead in the ladder at Mishawaka and ten at South Bend in a single day, with some 500 fresh fish through South Bend since July 25 — the summer Skamania run arriving at the top of its river one fish at a time, tallied by the men who raised them. The same column fixes the impoundment above the Twin Branch Dam as the walleye water: "walleye fishing has remained very good above the Twin Branch Dam," the fish coming from ten to twelve feet, limits with many sub-legal fish — the sporting echo of the plantings at Maggie's Landing, the Mishawaka launch where the Indiana DNR and the Michiana Walleye Association have made biennial stockings of walleye fingerlings, thousands at a time in the documented years, bought in part with hydro-dam remediation money. The walleye, absent from Chapman's 1880 list altogether, is now the impoundment's signature fish, and it got there by truck, through a Mishawaka ramp, on a two-year rhythm kept by the state and a local association together.

Principal sources

1. Indiana Department of Natural Resources — the South Bend Fish Ladder page, in.gov (the five ladders; the sixty-three miles to the Twin Branch Dam base; the monitoring camera and its purposes), read November 2026; the Mishawaka Fish Ladder marker (erected 2013), as carried in the parks-river file.
2. Louie Stout's Michiana outdoors columns, Michiana Outdoors News — the July ladder counts (ten steelhead at Mishawaka in a day; about 500 through South Bend since 25 July, per biologist Brian Breidert); the walleye above the Twin Branch Dam (Mike McNulty, Midway Bait); the biennial Maggie's Landing walleye stockings (DNR and Michiana Walleye Association).
3. Michigan Department of Natural Resources, Fisheries Technical Report 94-5 — the fall 1992 ladder counts, printed whole in South Bend's file.