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Swamp Land Act era – the ditching generation, 1882–1917
Liberty Township farms the county's wet western edge, and drainage is the act that made much of that farming possible. Howard's county history devotes a chapter section to drainage whole — its contents, verified, run the Swamp Land Act, Professor Campbell's survey, the removal of the Momence rock, and general drainage — and that chapter's text is the named settler for this article's full course; it was located, not yet extracted. The township frame around it is proven: Liberty Township was formed by county board order of 2 May 1837 out of Greene Township, and the Commercial District nomination records that the township "remained somewhat separated from larger markets in South Bend and LaPorte due to wetlands and marshes in the region." The pattern at the township's immediate west is documented in Howard's townships chapter: by commissioners' order of 20 June 1898, the Olive, Warren, and Greene township boundary was changed because "private individuals causing a large ditch [the Miller Ditch] to be dug through the Kankakee marsh, thus drying up the Kankakee river which has been the boundary line" — the ditch replaced the dried riverbed as the division line. That boundary is Greene, Olive, and Warren ground, immediately west and northwest of Liberty; it prints here as the township's western-edge pattern, not as a Liberty Township ditch. The frame behind the pattern: the Grand Kankakee Marsh once covered some 1,500 square miles between present South Bend and Momence, Illinois; a ditching effort of more than fifty years after the Civil War straightened roughly 250 meandering river miles into about 90; the marsh was destroyed mainly between 1882 and 1917; under 5 percent remains; and Potato Creek State Park, on this township's own creek, is one of the restoration and purchase sites. Potato Creek's own drainage record at North Liberty — the millpond and marsh course of the town's stream, and any named Liberty Township ditch or drainage district — was not found in any carrier searched: a tested negative at search strength, standing as a named gap whose settlers are Howard's drainage chapter read whole, Frederick Karst's Potato Creek history of 1980 (the millpond's settler in the businesses leg as well), and the county Drainage Board's regulated-drain list.