Big Timber Creek is a 5.6-mile-long (9.0 km) stream in southwestern New Jersey, United States, and is also known by the name 'Tetamekanchz Kyl' by the Lenape tribes. It drains a watershed of 63 square miles (160 km2). A tributary of the Delaware River, it enters the Delaware between the boroughs of Brooklawn and Westville, just south Gloucester City and across from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The main stream and South Branch form about half of the border between Camden and Gloucester counties.
Pre-Columbian Big Timber Creek was home to numerous villages of the Lenni Lenape. In colonial times, the creek was a commercial waterway, and it powered a multitude of mills up through the 1950s. In the second half of the 20th century it suffered the ill effects of the rapid post–World War II development that plagued many of America's waterways. As of 2007, it had recovered somewhat, thanks to pollution controls and improvements in sewage treatment.
Read more about Big Timber Creek: The Name
Famous quotes containing the words big, timber and/or creek:
“Dr. Floyd, I hope you don’t think I’m being too inquisitive but perhaps you can clear up the great big mystery about what has been going on up there.”
—Stanley Kubrick (b. 1928)
“Here commences what was called, twenty years ago, the best timber land in the State. This very spot was described as “covered with the greatest abundance of pine,” but now this appeared to me, comparatively, an uncommon tree there,—and yet you did not see where any more could have stood, amid the dense growth of cedar, fir, etc.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The only law was that enforced by the Creek Lighthorsemen and the U.S. deputy marshals who paid rare and brief visits; or the “two volumes of common law” that every man carried strapped to his thighs.”
—State of Oklahoma, U.S. relief program (1935-1943)