Our Watershed
What is a watershed, anyway?
A watershed is the area of land surrounding a body of water that drains into that body of water when it rains. It’s a topographical boundary. The edges of a watershed are the high points in the land.
The purple area on the map below shows the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed. When it rains, any water that falls on the purple area of the map that is not absorbed into the land will eventually run into the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Creek.
Please click on the image above for a larger, scrollable and zoomable version of the map.
Location:
The 29 square mile Tookany/Tacony-Frankford watershed is located in southeast Pennsylvania, within and just outside the city of Philadelphia. The Tookany Creek section lies within Montgomery County and the Tacony-Frankford Creek section lies within Philadelphia County. Municipalities in our watershed include: Abington Township, Cheltenham Township, Jenkintown Borough, Montgomery County, Philadelphia County, Rockledge Borough, and Springfield Township.
Tookany Creek:
The Tookany Creek section of the watershed (north of Cheltenham Ave.) contains 25.37 total linear miles of stream. These include the headwater tributaries in Abington and Cheltenham townships, as well as in Jenkintown and Rockledge Boroughs, all in Montgomery County. The six main tributaries are:
- Baeder Creek
- Jenkintown Creek
- Leeches Run
- Main Stem
- Mill Run
- Rock Creek
Tacony-Frankford Creek:
The Tacony-Frankford section of the watershed (south of Cheltenham Ave.) contains 6.8 total linear miles of stream. The Tookany Creek is renamed the Tacony Creek as it leaves Montgomery County and enters Philadelphia at Cheltenham Avenue. Tacony Creek then becomes Frankford Creek when it joins the historic Wingohocking Creek at I Street and Ramona by the Juniata Golf Course. The creek flows into the Delaware River just south of the Betsy Ross Bridge.
History*
Prior to the European settlement in the 1600s, the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford watershed, like the rest of the area that is now Philadelphia, was inhabited by Native Americans of the Lenape tribe. Swedes and Finns traveling up the Delaware River were the first European inhabitants of the Tacony Creek Valley, while Germans fleeing religious persecution settled in the western portion of the watershed in what is now Germantown. In 1664, the land that is now southeastern Pennsylvania was surrendered to the English by the Dutch. In 1681, King Charles II of England granted William Penn 40,000 acres of land in the Delaware Valley as repayment for a debt owed to Penn’s father. The entire Toookany/Tacony-Frankford watershed lies within the area of this land grant. With the establishment of Penn’s colony, English settlers flocked to the region, establishing homesteads, plantations and towns.
The Tacony Creek and surrounding valley was primarily developed as an area of agriculture and milling operations, and became a center for industrial operations during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Expansion of the city in the late 1800s converted farmland into residential neighborhoods, though active agriculture persisted in the upper watershed until the early 1900s. High density housing characterizes the development of the area after the 1940s.
*(from the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Integrated Watershed Management Plan, 2005)
The Watershed Today
Currently, the Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Creek experiences all of the usual urban ills including litter and illegal dumping, “channelization” of portions of the stream, steeply eroded streambanks, degraded aquatic and riparian habitat, and impaired water quality. Its watershed is home to approximately 357,000 people with a range of income levels and ethnicities, and a variety of community strengths and struggles. Ideally, the creek should serve as a meeting place, a place for relaxation, recreation, inspiration, and community connection. Currently, however, in many places, the compromised state of the creek’s health and aesthetics deters residents from enjoying it as a community asset. These areas are abandoned, only to be occupied by criminal use evident in all-terrain vehicle use, graffiti, and other illegal behavior.
The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership
Grassroots solutions to these problems spring up periodically from inspired individuals and groups in localized areas of the watershed, but their effects are severely limited without watershed-wide coordination and connections to municipal and state level resources. The Tookany/Tacony-Frankford Watershed Partnership was created to make those connections, to build a network sharing inspiration, effort and knowledge.
