Baugo Creek whole

THE CREEK FROM ITS RISE TO THE BAY

Baugo Creek is an Elkhart County stream that finishes in Penn Township, and its watershed plan is the governing modern record: the Indiana Department of Environmental Management's Baugo Creek Watershed Management Plan (2004, prepared with the Michiana Area Council of Governments) states the course in one sentence: "The mainstem of Baugo Creek begins on the Westside of C.R. 1, 0.50 mile north of C.R. 40 in Elkhart County. It discharges into the St. Joseph River north of Ferretti-Baugo County Park at Baugo Bay." The watershed covers 49,581 acres across the two counties, divided by the plan into four subwatersheds — Baugo Creek–Rogers Ditch, Grimes Ditch, Baugo Creek–Wisler Ditch and Baugo Creek–Olive Township Ditch — under the St. Joseph basin. The Indiana Natural Resources Commission's navigable-waterways roster lists "Baugo Creek: Navigable from its junction with the St. Joseph River in South Bend for 15.2 river miles to the main forks (near Wakarusa)," with variant names Banbango Creek and Bangango Creek; Chapman spells the name "Bawbawgo creek," and the county parks master plan gives the fuller form "Baubaugo," said in that plan to mean "devil water," for the creek's rapid rise after heavy rain. The named tributaries, in the plan's order, run Wisler, Billman, Grimes, Barkey and Rogers Ditches from the west side and Miller, Doering, Davidhiser and Werntz Ditches and the Nunemaker line to Olive Township Ditch from the east; inside Penn Township itself, the federal names record fixes Rogers Ditch and Barkey Ditch in the township's southern tier. The creek is a managed drain as well as a stream: in 1987–88 the Department of Natural Resources ran a clearing and snagging project from the creek's mouth about 11.5 miles upstream into Elkhart County, which initiated Baugo Creek as a regulated drain. The federal geographic-names points place the creek's mouth at 41.66753 degrees north, 86.07087 degrees west, on the township's riverfront immediately east of the townsite.

One correction to this build's own earlier printing: Before the City describes the creek as "a gaged stream" on the strength of United States Geological Survey station 04101080, Baugo Creek at Osceola. The Survey's own station record, read whole for this section, does not support the phrase. The station stands not in Osceola and not in St. Joseph County but in Baugo Township, Elkhart County, just east of the county line and south of the town, at a drainage area of 75.60 square miles; it is not a continuous gage at all but a miscellaneous-measurement site whose entire published record is three approved field measurements in 1988 — 3.00 cubic feet per second on 28 July, 4.73 on 9 September and 4.01 on 12 October. No peak-flow record exists for the station, and no daily record; the largest figure in it, 4.73 cubic feet per second, is a late-summer low-flow measurement and must not be printed as a flood peak. The creek's flood numbers, if they are ever printed for this ground, will have to come from another record; the station's drainage area of 75.60 square miles against the watershed plan's 49,581 acres (about 77.5 square miles) is a delineation difference between two honest sources — the gage sits a short distance above the mouth — and both figures stand as sourced.

The creek's modern condition is an impairment record: IDEM's basin assessments found fecal coliform violations in Baugo Creek as early as the 1977 Michiana Area Council of Governments report (3,000 per 100 milliliters in wet weather, against 500–600 in the river itself); a 1990 basin nitrate snapshot measured the watershed's ditches among the highest of twenty basin sites (Grimes Ditch 9.6 milligrams per liter, Rogers Ditch 8.5, Baugo Creek 5.8); and IDEM's 2000 basin assessment found the creek's E. coli geometric mean at 1,919 colonies per 100 milliliters — against an Indiana geometric-mean standard of 125 — "the highest of any other sites sampled by IDEM in the St. Joseph River Basin." The creek stood on Indiana's 303(d) list of impaired waters, rated non-supporting for primary contact recreation. That is the creek's documented present: the mill stream of 1831 is the basin's most contaminated measured water, and the two facts belong to the same record.