Across the Line: The County Parks

Boundary entry — the county's system, at the size the city's record gives it

Lead: St. Joseph County keeps its own park system under its own parks board, and it is the county's story, printed here at boundary size because the city's record keeps touching it — the county commissioners gave the city its fairgrounds in 1906 and the Pinhook property in 1918, and the county's first park was a gift of South Bend industry. The St. Joseph County Parks and Recreation Board was newly formed when, in 1966, the Bendix Corporation donated 175 acres and the Studebaker Clubhouse to it; "this donation resulted in St. Joseph County's first county park," the county's own park history says. The ground, on State Road 2 south of New Carlisle in Olive Township, was Studebaker's proving ground of 1926 — the first controlled automotive testing grounds of an American car company — and the clubhouse, built 1926, serves as the parks' offices and nature center.

In 1969 some twenty more acres were sold to the county parks, bringing Bendix Woods County Park to its present 195 acres; within it lies a state-dedicated nature preserve of twenty-six acres, one of the first ten dedicated by the Indiana Division of Nature Preserves. The park's famous planting is the living sign: a half-mile of pines spelling STUDEBAKER, each letter two hundred feet wide, listed with the clubhouse in the National Register of Historic Places on 18 September 1985 and carried in the Guinness Book of World Records of 1987 as the longest living advertisement. The county's own publications date the planting two ways — its Bendix Woods brochure says the Civilian Conservation Corps planted the sign in 1938, 8,259 six-inch seedlings to a design by two Studebaker engineers, Michael de Blumenthal and Mel S. Niemier, as a salute to the growing aviation industry; the county's Bendix Woods master-plan sheet says the pines were planted in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps. Both dates stand as the county prints them.

The rest of the county system stands at the size the city's own master plan gives it in its regional survey: St. Patrick's County Park, 105 accessible acres on the east bank of the St. Joseph River at the Indiana–Michigan state line; Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park, 210 acres along Baugo Creek and Baugo Bay near Osceola; and Spicer Lake County Park, around a kettle-hole lake in the county's northwest corner, its boardwalk some 1,200 feet. The county system works under its own five-year master plan (2019–2023, prepared with the Troyer Group), and its trails are the Trails chapter's record. Potato Creek, thirteen miles southwest of the city, is a state park, not a county one, and stands outside both systems.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Parks, Bendix Woods park history (sjcparks.org): the 1966 Bendix donation of 175 acres and the clubhouse to the newly formed board; the county's first park; the 1969 addition to 195 acres; the 1938 CCC planting, the 8,259 seedlings and the designing engineers.
2. St. Joseph County Parks, Bendix Woods County Park master plan sheet, Five Year Master Plan 2019–2023 (the sign "planted in 1933 by the Civilian Conservation Corps"; the 195 acres) — the planting-year conflict printed from the county's own two publications.
3. City of South Bend Venues Parks & Arts, Master Plan Update 2021–2025, community description (St. Patrick's County Park, 105 acres; Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park, 210 acres; Spicer Lake County Park and its boardwalk; the Bendix Woods nature preserve among the first ten dedicated).
4. National Register of Historic Places (the Studebaker Clubhouse and Tree Sign, listed 18 September 1985); Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Nature Preserves (the Bendix Woods Nature Preserve).