Meander by Margaret Wooster

Author:Margaret Wooster [Wooster, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Nature, Ecosystems & Habitats, Rivers
ISBN: 9781438484693
Google: JEw5EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2021-08-01T22:12:16+00:00

TONAWANDA

We go first to Faun Lake because the Tonawanda Creek Watershed Committee has identified it as Tonawanda’s source, and it is easy to find.3 Faun Lake is an artificial lake hosting a seasonal private community. A long line of mailboxes on the road indicates 100 or so mobile homes that have taken root in the small woods around the lake. The gatekeeper gives us a windshield pass and a map. He raises the gate, cautioning us to drive slowly. It is the end of summer and people and cars are standing around on the narrow road, saying their goodbyes until next year.

Faun Lake is not nearly the size of Lake Victoria, but much larger than you would imagine given the size of the tiny first-order streamlet that was dammed to make it. We drive around the lake, where a marina, beach, lifeguard station, and fleet of power boats testify to the water storage capacity of the hill and the great aquifer nesting below.

Here is how the Watershed Committee describes Tonawanda’s flow down the titanic staircase to its mouth at Niagara, with a few of my own observations inserted.

TCWC: Tonawanda Creek … is approximately 101 miles in length and flows northwesterly on a meandering course through four counties—Wyoming, Genesee, Erie and Niagara. The headwaters of the East Fork originate in Wyoming County near Faun Lake … From its source, the creek flows northward approximately 22 miles through deep wooded valleys with steep slopes to enter the Erie Plain near Attica. (It) continues northward for nearly 20 miles through flat bottomland known as “The Flats.”

MW: Driving through these mucklands (good for carrots!), I once saw a boy and girl, dressed in Easter Sunday whites, netting a huge live carp from a ditch at the side of the road. They held up the muddy net containing the foot-and-a-half-long fish for me to see. We were at least a half mile from the creek but obviously still in the floodplain.

TCWC: At the “Big Bend” in Batavia, the Tonawanda meets the Onondaga Escarpment and takes a sharp left turn to begin flowing westerly through the Erie Plain and parallel to the Escarpment through the Town of Pembroke. The Tonawanda plunges over the Onondaga Escarpment via a 20 foot high waterfall at Indian Falls to enter the Huron Plain and winds through the flat bottomland of the Tonawanda Seneca Indian Reservation.

MW: Indian Falls is the first major natural barrier for fish (and mussels) going upstream in the Niagara River–Tonawanda Creek continuum. Species richness declines greatly upstream of this waterfall.4 The Tonawanda Seneca territory feels like an oasis of natural land. Its active floodplains host a greater diversity of spring wildflowers than I have seen anywhere else in western New York except in Allegany State Park.

TCWC: Continuing west, the creek forms a natural boundary between Niagara and Erie Counties, flowing to its confluence with the New York State Barge Canal in Pendleton.5

The last 11 miles of Tonawanda Creek, from the village of Pendleton to the Niagara River, have been channelized into the Erie Canal.

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