The Upper Potomac: Industry, Coal, and the Rivers That Carried a Watershed
The Upper Potomac
Industry, Coal, and the Rivers That Carried a Watershed
Long before the Potomac River reaches Washington, D.C., it has already traveled through a vast and complicated landscape. The Upper Potomac begins high in the Appalachian Mountains, where streams and mountain springs gather in the forests of West Virginia, western Maryland, and Pennsylvania. These cold headwaters form the North Branch and South Branch of the Potomac River, which eventually merge near Green Spring, West Virginia before continuing east toward Cumberland and beyond.
In these mountain regions the river begins as a clean, fast-flowing system fed by rain, snowmelt, and forest streams. But by the nineteenth century, as the United States expanded westward and industrialized, the Upper Potomac basin became deeply tied to the growth of American industry.
Coal, timber, railroads, and manufacturing transformed the valleys through which the river and its tributaries flowed.
The Coal Valleys
One of the most important industrial regions of the Upper Potomac watershed was the Georges Creek basin, located in western Maryland. For more than a century this valley was one of the most productive coal mining regions in the Appalachian Mountains.
Mining reshaped the land and the waterways.
When coal seams are exposed to air and water during mining operations, chemical reactions can produce acid mine drainage. This process creates sulfuric acid that dissolves metals from surrounding rock. Streams carrying this runoff often contain iron, aluminum, and manganese, turning the water orange or rust-colored in places.
Georges Creek and its tributaries carried this water into the North Branch of the Potomac, delivering the environmental consequences of mining downstream.
Similar mining activity occurred throughout nearby parts of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania, feeding additional tributaries that ultimately drained into the Potomac system.
For decades, little was done to control these discharges.
The river simply carried them away.
Cumberland: An Industrial Crossroads
Further downstream, the river passes through Cumberland, Maryland, one of the most important transportation and manufacturing hubs of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Cumberland sat at a strategic intersection of:
- the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad
- the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal
- major wagon and trade routes through the Appalachian Mountains
Because of this location, industry flourished.
Glass factories, tire manufacturing operations, textile mills, rail yards, metalworking shops, and other industries operated in the region. These industries depended heavily on water and transportation, both of which the river system provided.
In the early industrial era environmental regulations were almost nonexistent. Industrial wastewater, chemical residues, and manufacturing byproducts often entered nearby streams or drainage systems.
Many of those drainage channels flowed directly into Wills Creek, a tributary running through Cumberland before emptying into the Potomac River.
Through Wills Creek and other small streams, much of Cumberland’s industrial runoff eventually reached the Potomac.
The Tributaries of an Industrial Watershed
The Upper Potomac is not fed by a single river but by an intricate network of tributaries that drain large areas of mountainous terrain.
Several tributaries played important roles in carrying industrial and environmental impacts into the river system:
- Georges Creek – draining historic coal mining regions
- Wills Creek – running through Cumberland’s industrial corridor
- Evitts Creek – draining farmland and smaller communities
- Town Creek – flowing through agricultural valleys
- Sideling Hill Creek – collecting runoff from forested ridges and farms
- Patterson Creek – draining rural West Virginia landscapes
Each of these waterways gathered runoff from the land around them.
Coal mines, farms, timber operations, rail yards, and small manufacturing facilities all contributed sediments, nutrients, metals, and waste to the streams.
Once in the tributaries, these materials eventually flowed into the main river.
Agriculture and the Land
Not all of the pressures on the Upper Potomac were industrial.
Agriculture expanded throughout the valleys of western Maryland and West Virginia as farms developed along fertile floodplains. Fertilizers used to increase crop yields often washed into nearby streams during rainstorms.
These fertilizers contained nitrogen and phosphorus, nutrients that can stimulate excessive algae growth in rivers and lakes.
When algae blooms die and decompose, they consume oxygen in the water, creating conditions that can stress or kill fish and other aquatic life.
Over time these agricultural nutrients became another piece of the pollution puzzle moving downstream.
The River That Carries Everything
By the time the Potomac flows past Cumberland and continues eastward toward Washington, it has already collected the runoff of an enormous watershed.
Coal mining valleys.
Industrial towns.
Railroad corridors.
Farms and rural communities.
All of it feeds into the same river.
Water flowing through the Upper Potomac carries with it the environmental legacy of the entire Appalachian region through which it passes.
The story of the Potomac’s pollution—and later its recovery—cannot be understood without recognizing that reality.
A river is not just a ribbon of water visible from its banks.
It is the sum of every stream, creek, hillside, town, and valley that drains into it.
And in the case of the Upper Potomac, those connections once carried the waste of a growing industrial nation downstream.
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