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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 part of St. Joseph, runs west into the Kankakee." The modern carriers agree on the destination and fill in the course. The Indiana Department of Natural Resources' park brochure states that Potato Creek is a tributary of the Kankakee River, bordered by marsh that was once among North America's largest; a Notre Dame Magazine account of the Porter Rea ground traces the flow in sequence — the creek "begins in a swamp, flows into Worster Lake, then back out again until it joins Pine Creek and then the Kankakee," the Kankakee itself running on to the Illinois, the Mississippi, and the Gulf. The federal mussel survey of the basin (Wilson and Clark, Bureau of Fisheries, 1912, read first-hand) places the creek precisely in the system: "Potato Creek is the southernmost of several large creeks which empty into the east fork of the Kankakee, and lies just north of Walkerton," its bed "hard sand or gravel," and — the survey's point — "being undredged, it still preserves those alternations of swift and sluggish current, deep and shallow water, coarse and fine bottom, which are conducive to mussel life." The name, on the park's interpretive tradition as reached, comes from the wild potato, Apios americana, that early settlers found growing along its banks. The creek's total length is stated by no carrier reached and banks as a named gap, the USGS National Hydrography Dataset its settler.