Project Scroll Research Note 2026-40: Potato Creek, St. Joseph County, Indiana, in print: the gazetteer of 1849 and the late arrival of the "wild potato" story

Potato Creek runs west through Liberty Township, St. Joseph County, Indiana, to the Kankakee, and gives its name to Potato Creek State Park. The earliest printed description of the stream yet found is in E. Chamberlain's Indiana Gazetteer of 1849, p. 366: "Potato Creek, a mill stream in the southern part of St. Joseph, runs west into the Kankakee." The gazetteer of 1833 has no entry for it. The same 1849 page lists a second Potato Creek, "a mill stream in Montgomery county." The park's brochures explain the name by a plant with potato-like roots gathered along the creek. That explanation was not found in the nineteenth-century gazetteers, county histories or place-name books searched, nor in the park guidebooks of 1984–2000. Its earliest form yet found is a Purdue University Calumet student newspaper of 31 January 2005, which says the park "is named after potato-like roots." The only nineteenth-century Indiana story of a creek named for wild potatoes belongs to the other stream: the 1881 history of Montgomery County says its Potato Creek and prairie "took their name from the wild potatoes that then grew so luxuriantly in this slough." Project Scroll Research Note 2026-40, version 1. The note sets out the record quoted, where it is held, what it changes, its limits, and what was searched before calling it new. Web version: projectscroll.com/discoveries/notes/2026-40/.