Valley Creek is a 10.8-mile-long (17.4 km) tributary of the Schuylkill River in eastern Chester County, Pennsylvania, United States, flowing through an area known as the Great Valley.
Around 1740 a forge was erected along Valley Creek near its confluence with the Schuylkill. This gave rise to the community of Valley Forge. Later the creek powered a saw mill and grist mill there. In 1777, the forge and mills were destroyed by the British Army during the American Revolutionary War. In December of 1777, George Washington chose Valley Forge as the site for the winter encampment of the Continental Army partly because Valley Creek and the Schuylkill River formed natural defensive barriers for the rear of the camp. Washington's Headquarters during this period was in a farmhouse close to the confluence. The American forces departed in the spring of 1778.
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Famous quotes containing the words valley and/or creek:
“I see before me now a traveling army halting,
Below a fertile valley spread, with barns and the orchards of summer,
Behind, the terraced sides of a mountain, abrupt, in places rising high,”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“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)