White Clay Creek is an 18.5-mile-long (29.8 km) tributary of the Christina River in southern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware in the United States. It is renowned for its scenic character and is largely federally protected.
The 107-square-mile (280 km2) White Clay Creek watershed is home to nearly 100,000 people and includes parts of Chester County, Pennsylvania and New Castle County, Delaware. The Pennsylvania portion still retains a rural character while the Delaware portion is more suburbanized. Sediment eroded from the rolling hills of Chester County is carried into the White Clay, probably accounting for the creek's name.
The majority of the stream is in the Piedmont region which is characterized by rolling hills, plateaus, and stream valleys. The southern portion of the stream, near Newark is in the Atlantic Coastal Plain, a relatively flat area that is dotted with large tidal wetlands. The White Clay Creek empties into the Christina River at Churchman’s Marsh.
Read more about White Clay Creek: East Branch, Middle Branch, West Branch, Main Stem, History and Ecology
Famous quotes containing the words white, clay and/or creek:
“The birch stripped of its bark, or the charred stump where a tree has been burned down to be made into a canoe,—these are the only traces of man, a fabulous wild man to us. On either side, the primeval forest stretches away uninterrupted to Canada, or to the “South Sea”; to the white man a drear and howling wilderness, but to the Indian a home, adapted to his nature, and cheerful as the smile of the Great Spirit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The earth is covered thick with other clay,
Which her own clay shall cover, heaped and pent,
Rider and horse,—friend, foe,—in one red
burial blent!”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)