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Parks — North Liberty
North Liberty's park record is two grounds and a contrast. In town stands a seven-acre park the WPA built out of glacial fieldstone in the Depression — entrances, a bandstand, a bathhouse, a footbridge over the creek — listed in the National Register in 2007. Three miles east, on township ground, stands a 3,840-acre state park that did not exist until 1977 and now draws the region. Between the fieldstone park and the state park, this section carries the town's whole public-ground history, with the plans and trails that connect them.
North Liberty Park: the fieldstone park the WPA built
1935 and 1937 · listed 29 March 2007 · NRIS 07000211
North Liberty Park, also carried as North Liberty Community Park, lies at 309 North Jefferson Street, on the town's northwest side, in a little valley on both sides of Potato Creek. Its National Register nomination — read in the…
Potato Creek State Park: the township's park, at its true frame
Dedicated 6 June 1977 · state park 1983 · boundary article
Potato Creek State Park is not in North Liberty; it is in Liberty Township, about three miles east of the town, and it is printed at that frame on purpose. Its facts, from the Department of Natural Resources' and the park's own…
First ground and park government: the tests
Tested November 2026
Whether the 1836 plat reserved a public square is stated by no carrier reached. Antrim's dedication, as the Story of North Liberty section prints it, specifies streets, alleys, and lots, and no public ground is named in the text reached; the town's first public ground of record is therefore the WPA park itself, bought or given at a date the nomination does not state — a named gap whose settlers are the town's deed and minute records. Park government prints at the same thinness: no park board's creation, abolition, or restoration for this town is carried by any source reached, and the park stands in the town's present record simply as a town department's charge among others. The branch's standard article is not manufactured; the absence is the article.
Trails and the planning line
2015 – 2040, as banked
The town's modern plans are built around joining its two parks together. The 2015 Stellar Communities projects, as the adopted 2022 comprehensive plan recounts them, included a School Trail and a planned new trail toward Potato…
Porter Rea Cemetery: the park's oldest ground
1830s – present · boundary article
Inside the state park stands a cemetery older than the town's own. The park's interpretive record tells it: Samuel Huggart, a free African-American from Virginia, came to St. Joseph County in 1834 and bought eighty acres on what is now the park's east side, in the settlement that took his name; the Porter Rea Cemetery there holds the graves of free Black settlers buried beside their white neighbours before the Civil War. It is the township's ground and the Black-history record's subject, carried here at the size a parks leg owes the oldest human mark inside its largest park — a reminder that the state park's 3,840 acres were a lived landscape, farms and a burying ground, long before they were a recreation area.