Where does Winona Lake’s water come from?

Winona Lake collects its water from about 18,730 acres of surrounding land. That figure comes from the Lilly Center for Lakes & Streams at Grace College, which profiles the lake, its inlets, and its outlet. The area is the lake’s watershed, and it is large: roughly 33 times the surface of the lake itself, which covers about 570 acres. You can see the whole thing on the interactive watershed map on this site, with the boundary, the streams, and every upstream lake drawn in place.

This article traces the water back to where it starts. It covers what a watershed actually is, follows the four named ditch systems that feed the lake, counts the 14 lakes that share the drainage, and ends where the water leaves: Eagle Creek, on its way to the Tippecanoe River.

What a watershed is

A watershed is all the land that drains to a common point. Water follows gravity: rain sheds toward the nearest low spot, low spots feed channels, and channels join larger streams. Draw a line around all the ground that eventually sends water to one particular lake, and you have drawn that lake’s watershed.

To make it concrete, follow a raindrop that lands on a farm field several miles southeast of Winona Lake. Some of the rain soaks into the soil and moves slowly underground. The rest runs downhill across the surface, finds the low edge of the field, and joins a small channel. That channel feeds Tennant Ditch, one of the lake’s four named tributary systems, and Tennant Ditch carries the drop the rest of the way to the lake. A drop that lands a short distance away, on the far side of the high ground that forms the watershed boundary, drains toward a different stream and never reaches Winona at all. The trip is not instant, either. In dry weather the ditches carry a modest flow fed by water that soaked in earlier; after a storm they rise quickly as the surface runoff arrives.

Everything inside the boundary works this way. Fields, woods, wetlands, parking lots, and lakeside yards all shed water toward the same place, whether they sit at the shoreline or miles from it.

The four ditch systems that feed the lake

The watershed map names four ditch systems that carry water toward Winona Lake. Each drains its own portion of the watershed, and each enters the lake at a different point. As the Evans Ditch entry below shows, different records sometimes use different names for the same stream, so it helps to know the variants.

Peterson Ditch

Peterson Ditch is the southern branch. It drains agricultural and residential land south of the lake and enters on the southwest side. The Watershed Foundation describes it as a 13-mile inlet and the largest contributor of sediment and phosphorus to Winona Lake, which is why it has become the focus of restoration work upstream.

Evans Ditch (Keefer-Evans Ditch)

Evans Ditch flows north through Lake John before it reaches Winona. Federal records label the stream Keefer-Evans Ditch, and the Lilly Center’s lake profile lists the inlet under that name as well. Both names refer to the same water, so keep the pairing in mind when you read maps or water quality reports.

Wyland Ditch

Wyland Ditch connects Sharon, Sheely, and Wyland lakes to Winona. Each of those lakes gathers water from its own small drainage area, and Wyland Ditch strings them together on the way down, so what happens around any of the three eventually rides the same channel toward Winona.

Tennant Ditch

Tennant Ditch is the southeastern tributary, passing near Tennant and Sellers lakes on its way in. It is the route the raindrop from the earlier example takes, and you can trace its full path through the southeastern corner of the boundary on the watershed map.

The 14 lakes of the watershed

The Lilly Center’s map of the watershed shows 14 lakes: Winona, Sheely, Wyland, Stevens, Reed, McPherson, Stafford, Sherburn, Sellers, Tennant, Laspew (sometimes spelled Larrew), Lake John, Sharon, and Horseshoe. Winona is the largest of the 14, and it sits farthest downstream. Each of the others appears on the interactive map, where you can see which ditch system connects it to the big lake.

Sitting farthest downstream defines Winona’s position in the system. The other 13 lakes, and all the land around them, drain in Winona’s direction. When an upstream bank erodes or an upstream field sheds fertilizer, some share of that material has a route to Winona, which sits at the bottom of the funnel.

Where the water goes next

Water leaves Winona Lake through one outlet, Eagle Creek, according to the Lilly Center’s profile. From there it joins Walnut Creek, and Walnut Creek carries it to the Tippecanoe River. The creek preserves the lake’s older name: Winona Lake was called Eagle Lake until the Winona Assembly renamed it in 1895.

The outlet completes the picture of what watershed position means. Winona receives what everything upstream sheds, and it passes its own water, along with whatever that water carries, downstream toward the Tippecanoe. The same logic that connects an upstream field to Winona connects a Winona shoreline to the river.

Why the acreage depends on who drew the boundary

The 18,730-acre figure is the Lilly Center’s measurement. The federal government draws its own line: the Watershed Boundary Dataset, maintained by the USGS and USDA, defines a subwatershed named Winona Lake-Eagle Creek, hydrologic unit code 051201060203, and its polygon covers a somewhat different area. The interactive map on this site draws the federal boundary while quoting the Lilly Center’s acreage, and the mismatch between the two is a normal feature of watershed mapping.

Boundaries like these are delineated from elevation data, and different organizations use different source datasets and different rules for where to cut off headwater areas. Two careful maps of the same watershed rarely match exactly. The lake’s surface area behaves the same way: the Indiana DNR lists 562 acres, the Lilly Center lists 571, and this site’s own GIS work lands near 569. None of those numbers is a mistake. They come from slightly different methods applied to slightly different data, which is why rounded figures like “about 18,700 acres” and “about 570 acres” are usually the honest way to talk about the lake. If you need a single number to cite, use the Lilly Center’s 18,730 acres and name the source; if you need a boundary to draw on a map, the federal dataset is the standard reference.

What the runoff carries

Watershed geography matters because runoff picks things up along the way. By the time a raindrop reaches the lake it has crossed some combination of fields, lawns, roofs, and pavement, and it carries traces of each.

• Soil and phosphorus: eroding streambanks and bare ground send sediment downstream, and phosphorus travels with that sediment. In the lake, phosphorus feeds algae.
• Bacteria: pet waste, livestock manure, and failing septic systems all contribute. The Lilly Center’s E. coli explainer puts it plainly: “Rain collects E. coli from animal waste and disposes of it in the nearest body of water.”
• Pavement runoff: oil and road salt wash off roads and driveways during storms and thaws.
• Yard care: grass clippings and fertilizer add nutrients that end up feeding the same algae.

Distance offers less protection than you might expect. A poorly timed fertilizer application five miles up Peterson Ditch has a route to the lake, just as a leaking septic system near Lake John has a route down Evans Ditch. That is why local conservation groups spend so much of their effort far from Winona’s shoreline. The Watershed Foundation works across the 236-square-mile Upper Tippecanoe River watershed, and its Winona-specific projects, like the Peterson Ditch work, happen miles upstream of the water they protect. The reverse holds as well: a strip of deep-rooted native plants along an upstream ditch filters runoff and holds soil in place, protecting water its owner may never see.

Before you go

The best way to absorb all of this is to look at it. Open the interactive watershed map, find your house or a road you drive, and trace the path water takes from there to the lake. If you live inside the boundary, your yard drains to Winona whether or not you can see the water from your window. The site’s other maps, including the depth chart built from the DNR’s bathymetric survey, are collected on the maps page.

If the upstream work interests you, two follow-ups are worth your time. The stewardship page lists the organizations working on the lake’s behalf, including The Watershed Foundation and the Winona Lake Preservation Association, with ways to support each. And the restoration underway on Peterson Ditch, the lake’s largest sediment source, has moved from a streambank study to a funded design and build project; the Peterson Ditch article covers how that happened and what the project is expected to keep out of the lake.