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Rivers — North Liberty
North Liberty is not a river town, and this section does not make it one. The St. Joseph River, the county's great stream, runs twelve miles north and belongs to other towns' builds. The water this town actually has is a creek — Potato Creek, a mill stream of the southern county that powered its first industry, still runs through its park, and a few miles east fills the lake of the state park named for it — and, at the township's western edge, the headwater reach of the Kankakee River, which the town has never stood on. Between the creek and the river, the whole of this town's water history is written, and it prints here at that scale.
Potato Creek, whole: a mill stream running west to the Kankakee
Named by 1849 – present
The first description of the town's creek in print is a gazetteer's eleven words. The Indiana Gazetteer of 1849, distinguishing this creek from a namesake in Montgomery County, enters: "POTATO CREEK, a mill stream in the southern…
The working creek: the mills, the pond, and the end of water power
1837 – 1880s
Potato Creek is the reason there is a town here at all: the town grew up around a gristmill on it. The Story of North Liberty section carries the course whole and this section points to it at the size the water owns: the…
The one dam: Worster Lake, 1977
1977
Potato Creek carries exactly one dam of record, and it is not in the town. In 1977 the state dammed the creek on township ground east of North Liberty to make Worster Lake, the 327-acre centre of the new Potato Creek Recreation…
The Kankakee, at its true frame: the township's western water
1837 – present · boundary article
The Kankakee River has bounded this township since the township was made, and it has never touched the town. Howard's printing of the county board's order of 2 May 1837 runs Liberty Township's western line "west to the Kankakee…
Crossings, cup, and sewer: the creek in the town's works
1935 – present
The town crosses its creek on foot in its park, drinks from wells, and treats its sewage at a plant the minutes discuss in percentages. The crossings of record are the park's: the Works Progress Administration's footbridge over…
Floods and the gauge: a tested thinness
Tested November 2026
No flood crest series, gauge record, or named flood of Potato Creek at North Liberty was found in any source reached. No USGS stream gauge on the creek at this town is carried by the carriers opened, and no flood of the town by its creek — no inundation date, no crest, no damage account — appears in the county histories or the modern record reached. The negative prints at search strength and banks as a named gap: the USGS gauge record for the creek and the town paper's run are its settlers, and until one is read, the honest statement is that this creek's flood history is unwritten, not that it never rose.