Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park

The county frame; opened 1987, at Osceola

The eastern park: The county's eastern park walks a creek with a portage past. Henry R. Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park — named for a former county commissioner, on Ash Road at Osceola on the county's eastern edge — opened to the public in 1987; approximately twenty acres of its northern portion were reclaimed from a landfill, and the park has grown to 214 acres, preserving some fifty acres of marshland and island habitat where Baugo Creek meets Lake Osceola. The county's own trail map names the walking: the Palisades Trail at 0.8 of a mile, the Portage Trail at 1.1 miles, and the Portage Loop at 0.1 — two miles of named trail in the county's own figures, most of it extending south of SR 933 along the creek, and all of it closed at high water. The Portage Trail's name is the park's interpretation of its own ground: Baugo Creek was a Native American travel and trade route, its portage the footpath this section's first article describes, and the county's interpreters still work the creek in a replica 34-foot voyageur canoe. The park stands in Osceola, outside the city, on county ground — printed at the county frame, as the brief of this section requires.

Sources:

1. St. Joseph County Parks, Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park trail map and brochure (the 1987 opening, the reclaimed acreage, the named trails and their distances, the high-water closure).
2. St. Joseph County Parks, Ferrettie/Baugo Creek County Park Master Plan Map 2019–2023 (the 214 acres, the fifty acres of marshland and island habitat, the Ferrettie name, the voyageur canoe).