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 federal record for this section — tells the building whole: President Roosevelt established the Works Progress Administration in 1935, Indiana got projects under way that summer, and WPA crews built this park in two campaigns, 1935 and 1937, "using local labor and materials readily at hand, in this case, the ubiquitous fieldstone of northern Indiana." They made ornamental fieldstone entrances, steps down into the park, a footbridge over the creek, a bandstand atop a sturdy fieldstone tool shed, and the rest of the fieldstone work; they outlined the swimming pool with fieldstone and built a bath house; and they created five fish-rearing ponds in the park's southeast and northeast corners, of which none survive. "Which features were constructed in 1935 and which in 1937 is not known," the nomination admits; "records are frustratingly sparse." The park was listed in the National Register on 29 March 2007 under Criteria A and C — for the New Deal work programs and for the WPA style entire — within the New Deal work-relief multiple-property nomination for St. Joseph County. One variance prints: a Living New Deal summary of the same park says construction "began in 1935 and was completed in the 1940s," against the nomination's two dated campaigns of 1935 and 1937; the nomination, the listing document, is the stronger carrier, and both tellings stand. The park in use — the annual picnic of the 1950s, its bandstand summers — is sampled in the events and kids-and-family legs, which point back here for the ground itself.