Big Timber Creek - The Name

The Name

The creek was named Tetamekanchz by the local Lenape tribe, with the North Branch named Tetamekanchz, the Chews Landing section named Arwames, Beaver Branch called Tekoke, and Little Timber Creek named Sassackon. The earliest recorded use of the current name is by an early Dutch explorer, David P. DeVries, who refers to a Timmer Kill, "Timber Creek" in Dutch, in his memoirs of his journey of 1630–1633, after the construction of Fort Nassau at its mouth. This name became anglicized when the Quakers arrived. In 1697, the West Jersey Proprietors, in creating the town of Gloucester, decreed that the name be the "Gloucester River", and although that name did appear in documents for several years, it faded away. A much smaller creek lying to the north, Little Timber Creek, finds the Delaware at the same place as its larger namesake. To differentiate between the two, the latter came to be known as "Great Timber Creek", which soon became "Big Timber Creek". Even so, at the end of the 20th century it was still usually referred to in speech as simply "Timber Creek".