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Pre-1830s–1930s · Potato Creek and Liberty Township
The field-trip culture that preceded designated trails here was a working one. The DNR brochure's park story: native peoples used this area for hunting and fishing for thousands of years, gathering the edible roots of the creek banks; the first European-descent settlers arrived in the 1830s; springhouses and mills dotted the township's farms. The organized walking that made the park began with conservation, not recreation: Darcey Worster and his conservation club proposed a park on Potato Creek in the late 1930s, World War II halted the project, and designation followed in 1969. The club-to-park sequence is this ground's equivalent of the naturalist-society founding the floor looks for — a local conservation club, a named man, a dated proposal.
The land-trust test prints as a negative at town frame: no ACRES-type land trust preserve in Liberty Township was found in the sources read, and no trust founding belongs to this ground. The township's preserved walking ground is public — one state park — rather than trust-held. Settler: the land trusts' own preserve lists for St. Joseph County (ACRES Land Trust; Shirley Heinze Land Trust, which holds preserves elsewhere in the county's region).