The marsh and the drainage course: Chapman's great marsh, the Island, and the regulated drain

1880–2002 · DRAINAGE AS ITS OWN ARTICLE

The founding record of Penn Township drainage is a description, and Chapman wrote it: the township carries a great marsh running southeast from the river almost the township's length, three-quarters of a mile to two miles wide, with an elevated "Island" of 200 to 300 acres standing in it (Chapman, p. 789). That marsh is the township's second geography: wet ground that grew hay and mint where it grew anything, fenced the farms from each other, and set the drainage question that the next century and a quarter of ditch law would work on. The creek that drains the township's north — Baugo Creek, the mill seat's stream — cuts across the grain of the marsh to the river at the town; the creek's own hydrology and Baugo Bay's making are The Land's, and the road record adds one dated beat this section prints at pointer size: by 1903 a dam project had raised Baugo Bay across the old roadbed at the creek's mouth, water enough to bend the Lincoln Highway's course (the Lincoln Highway Association's Indiana byway guide, as carried in the Story of Osceola section) — farm drainage and the highway meeting at the same wet ground.

The documented drainage course of the modern record is the creek's, and it is dated: Baugo Creek became a regulated drain in 1987–88, when a "clearing and snagging" project conducted by the Indiana Department of Natural Resources (Project No. E6-030) ran from the creek's mouth approximately 11.5 miles to County Road 32 in Elkhart County (Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan, MACOG / St. Joseph River Basin Commission, September 2004, p. 25). A second, more extensive project began in 1998 as Phase I — logjam removal, logs cabled to banks, sediment deposits removed — managed by a Joint Baugo Creek Drainage Board and taking nearly five years to complete; four sediment traps, each 300 feet by 2 feet, were installed as its extension and are maintained by the Elkhart County Drainage Board, at sites the plan names (northwest of Jimtown on C.R. 22; east of C.R. 3; west of C.R. 1 at Brown Farm; at the C.R. 130 bridge). In 2001 a petition was received for reconstruction of the Olive Township Ditch in one portion, the work running 2001–2002 as part of the brushing project from S.R. 19 to Baugo Creek. The watershed the plan governs is 49,581 acres — 57.7 percent in Elkhart County, 42.3 percent in St. Joseph — "primarily agriculture in landuse," in four sub-watersheds (Baugo Creek–Wisler Ditch, Baugo Creek–Rogers Ditch, Grimes Ditch, Baugo Creek–Olive Township Ditch), discharging to the St. Joseph River north of Ferrettie–Baugo County Park west of Ash Road. What the plan's record does not give this section is the nineteenth century's own ditching — the township ditch petitions, districts and assessments by which the marsh itself was first drained farm by farm. That course is a named gap in the closing roll; its settler is the county drainage record — the commissioners' and drainage board's minutes and the ditch files of the county surveyor — which no pass of this build has yet mined.

Sources:

1. Chapman (1880), p. 789 (the marsh and the Island); Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan — Plan I, Baugo Creek–Wisler Ditch (MACOG / St. Joseph River Basin Commission, final, September 2004), pp. 22–25 (landuse; the maintenance and reconstruction history), read first-hand for this build.
2. Lincoln Highway Association, Indiana byway guide (the 1903 dam and Baugo Bay), as carried in the Story of Osceola section.