Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park — 214 acres at the town's edge, opened 1987

1987–2026

The largest piece of park ground in Osceola's life stands just outside Osceola, and the line is this section's first fact about it. The Henry R. The county park therefore stands on township ground at the town's eastern edge, its entrance corner alone taken in by the corporation line — Osceola's by address, use, and a century of custom, the county's by government and the township's by the line, one gate excepted. The county's own account gives the park's making. It opened to the public in 1987, named for former County Commissioner Henry Ferrettie; its land was reclaimed — the park's ground included the former Mishawaka municipal dump, and approximately twenty acres of its northern portion were reclaimed from a former landfill. Lake Osceola, the park's interior lake, was created to provide a water feature, and the excavated earth from its digging was used to create the innertubing hill that anchors the park's winter season. The park protects fifty acres of marshland and island habitat where Baugo Creek meets the river, preserves some twenty acres of wetlands in Baugo Bay, and has grown to 214 acres. Its plant is the county system's full kit: Baugo Station, a large two-story rental facility overlooking the creek and Lake Osceola; a public access boat ramp on Baugo Bay; an accessible fishing pier on Lake Osceola; an eighteen-hole disc golf course with its pro shop in the gatehouse; hiking trails along Baugo Creek — the Palisades Trail at eight-tenths of a mile, the Portage Trail at a mile and a tenth — extending south of the Lincolnway to the Rendezvous picnic area; canoe and kayak livery on the creek and bay; horseshoes and volleyball at the gatehouse; and winter innertubing and snowshoeing on the dug hill. The park interprets its own ground: school groups work a living-history fur-trade program built around a thirty-four-foot replica voyageur canoe and an old-time school class, on the county's belief, printed at the park's own strength, that American Fur Company men passed here to trade; and the south side's woods hold plant rarities the county names — Green Dragon and Ohio Buckeye. A stream restoration project worked the creek in the spring and summer of 2007. An entrance fee runs on summer weekends and holidays; the trails are open in park hours except in high water. The park is not a finished artifact: the County Parks Board's September 2025 meeting sat at Baugo Station itself (no quorum; informational only), and the board's October 2025 papers record a recommended acceptance of a 0.34-acre land donation from the Strefling family on ground adjacent to the park — the boundary still moving, an acre at a time, in the park's fifth decade.

Sources

1. St. Joseph County Parks: the Ferrettie/Baugo Creek park page; the park brochure and trail map (the 1987 opening, the Ferrettie naming, the reclamation and the lake's digging, the marshland and wetlands figures); the Five Year Master Plan 2019–2023 park sheet (Troyer Group).
2. St. Joseph County Parks Board minutes and agenda packet, September–October 2025 (the Baugo Station meeting; the Strefling donation).