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1969 · 1977 · 1983
Potato Creek State Park stands about three miles east of the town, in Liberty Township — not in North Liberty, and it prints here at township strength. The park, addressed 25601 State Road 4, North Liberty, holds 3,840 acres — six square miles — with the 327-acre Worster Lake, on the same Potato Creek whose headwaters powered the town's mills. The record gives the park three dates, and they print whole because they are three different events that looser sources conflate into one "establishment": the area was designated to become a park in 1969; the six square miles were formally dedicated on 6 June 1977 by Governor Otis R. Bowen, as Potato Creek Recreation Area; and the ground was upgraded to state park status in 1983. The taking of the park's farmland into public ownership has its own archive: the 1990 "Farmland to Parkland" project recorded twenty oral-history interviews with the Liberty Township landowners and residents who had lived on what is now park ground, with more than 250 family photographs and 25 maps, and the collection sits at the park's Nature Center and at The History Museum in South Bend. A later pass on the park ground starts there; the park's course belongs to the township's story, and it is not folded into the town's.