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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 River, down the river to the LaPorte county line" — the river as a boundary call, miles west of the townsite, on ground taken out of Liberty when Lincoln Township was formed in 1866. The river itself, at survey size: some 133 miles long, rising in the marshes about five miles southwest of South Bend, flowing west and southwest across Indiana — channelised and straightened through its Indiana reach in the early twentieth century, out of the great marsh it once drained — into Illinois, where it joins the Des Plaines to form the Illinois River; designated a National Water Trail in 2016. The town's connection to it is drainage only: everything that rains on North Liberty and runs west reaches the Gulf of Mexico by Potato Creek, Pine Creek, and the Kankakee, on the far side of the continental divide from the St. Joseph River its county seat stands on. That divide, not a riverbank, is this town's place in the continent's water.