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Baw Beese Lake, Hillsdale County, Michigan, to Lake Michigan at St. Joseph–Benton Harbor
Course. The St. Joseph River rises at Baw Beese Lake in Hillsdale County, Michigan — an older federal form (USGS, 1901) gives the rise as the Bunday Hills of northern Hillsdale County, and both forms print. It flows north through Michigan, bends south through Elkhart and South Bend, Indiana, makes the abrupt north turn at South Bend that named that city, re-enters Michigan in southeastern Berrien County, takes the Paw Paw River about a mile from its end, and empties into Lake Michigan at St. Joseph–Benton Harbor. The fall from headwaters to lake is about 570 feet (Michigan DNR Technical Report 75-9, 1975). Length, printed whole because the sources conflict: 210 miles in the encyclopedia and Michigan DNR figures; a main stem of 206 miles in the watershed description. Neither figure is adopted over the other. Watershed: 4,685 square miles across fifteen counties in the watershed record; the banked Land fragment's flood-study figure of about 4,800 square miles stands as its own source's figure beside it, unmerged. The two-rivers-one-name problem, stated plainly: a second St. Joseph River rises within about five miles of the same Hillsdale headwaters and flows south, some hundred miles through Michigan and Ohio, to form the Maumee River at Fort Wayne in Allen County. That river never touches this county. Records for "the St. Joseph River" in Allen County, Defiance, or the Maumee belong to the southern river and are excluded from this section wherever they surface. Osceola's share of the northern river is the Penn Township frontage the Land leg carries — a bend reach on the township's north, with Baugo Creek entering it at 41.66753°N, 86.07087°W.
Sources: Michigan DNR Technical Report 75-9 (1975); St. Joseph River watershed description; USGS (1901) headwaters form; The Land (banked frontage, creek mouth coordinates, flood-study watershed figure).