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1880 – twentieth century
The marsh made the birds, and the drainage unmade them. Potato Creek is a tributary of the Kankakee River, and the DNR's park brochure states the frame plainly: its bordering marsh was once part of one of North America's largest wetlands, which supported huge populations of waterfowl, fish and aquatic plants. The South Bend build carried the system whole — Chapman's water birds, the market gun on the Grand Kankakee Marsh, and what the ditches did when the marsh was drained — and it carried the lost birds at the same standard: the prairie chicken, from Chapman's warning to the last bird, and the passenger pigeon over the county. This section adopts that county treatment as its own for the marsh system this township drains into, and adds only the township's piece: the creek and marsh ground along Potato Creek in Liberty Township is the southern edge of that same system, and the park's work since the 1990s — restoring wetlands and native prairie on ground not slated for development, on the DNR's account as carried by Visit South Bend Mishawaka — is the drainage story run backward on this ground. No last-bird date for the township was found, and none is invented.