Ocquionis Creek

I stood in that meadow with sun reflecting back from the isolated drops of water and realized that for a river like the Susquehanna there could be no beginning. It was simply there, the indefinable river, now broad, now narrow, in this age turbulent, in that asleep, becoming a formidable stream and then a spacious bay and then the ocean itself, an unbroken chain with all parts so interrelated that it will exist forever, even during the next age of ice.

—Thomas Applegarth upon reaching a source of the
Susquehanna in James Michener’s Chesapeake

Rain falling on a barn roof near that source of the Susquehanna River farthest from the Chesapeake Bay rolled off the south eaves toward the Susquehanna and the north eaves toward the Mohawk. So it is said. The claim cannot be verified because the barn was destroyed decades ago. In its place is the largest monastery of the Russian Orthodox Church outside Russia. Now rain falling on the monastery property drains either into soggy regions to the north that feed the Hudson by way of the Mohawk or into a swamp on the south side of the watershed ridge. The overflow from the swamp forms the beginning of the Susquehanna’s North Branch.

These wetlands stand about 1,500 feet above the sea, considerably lower than some other elevations along the Susquehanna’s northernmost reaches, which can rise over 2,000 feet. Lakelike after snowmelt or spring rain, the swamp shrinks to ankle depth in drought, with green and brown bottles sticking out of the gunk. Northern white cedars and swamp grass rim the tannin-dark water. Relatively warm and probably spring-fed, the swamp rarely freezes in winter.

This mucky puddle is as unremarkable as the monastery that soars nearby is unforgettable. One of the nation’s great rivers rises beside a cathedral with brilliantly gilded onion-shaped domes, where bearded, black-habited monks go about their monastic duties just as their brethren do thousands of miles away.

In 1930, two young Russian immigrant monks purchased the Starkweather farm, including its old water-dividing barn. The monks planted crops and began work on a complex of buildings that would attract other Russians and sightseers from around the world. They constructed a chapel and, in 1950, the cathedral. An expanding brotherhood then built the main monastery and opened a five-year college-level seminary. Today the monks of Holy Trinity Monastery operate a large printing plant and continue to farm.

To the monks, the cedar swamp is wasteland and a nuisance when it overfills. To Bruce Harter, who until recently lived on land adjoining the monastery property, this swamp is the birth water of the Ocquionis (an Iroquoian word, supposedly and inexplicably meaning "he is a bear").

Harter and his father and grandfather before him watched Ocquionis Creek trickle out of the swamp and across their land toward the village of Jordanville. Harter has always thought that the Ocquionis (also known as Fish Creek) is the ultimate source of the river. His father and grandfather believed the same.1

Ocquionis is a tranquil source. "There has never been a flooding, except once," Harter says. He is standing in the side yard of his former Jordanville home, looking toward the narrow course the Ocquionis takes down through the fields from the monastery, half a mile away. "The monks got the Department of Environmental Conservation to blow a beaver dam at the edge of the swamp in the spring of ’49 and that caused the flood."

Beavers occasionally dam the creek south of Jordanville as well, and that may explain how the tiny Ocquionis provided sufficient water to baptize some of the original settlers. In the decade after the War of Independence, a wave of revivalism swept through the United States. When that wave reached the Ocquionis, those dunked in the deepened creek named the town for the biblical baptismal river.

The Ocquionis is barely three feet wide where Route 167 crosses it in Jordanville, a village of fifty-some houses in Herkimer County. The creek winds west and then southeast to the hamlet of Cullen, where it is joined by a tiny branch and becomes unjumpable. Nester Shypski, one of many Russian Americans who live in this area and take pride in the monastery up on the ridge, shows where the creek runs underground for half a mile or so on his 175-acre farm. He also points out "chyle holes"—deep caves into which rainwater disappears before joining the Ocquionis.

When the creek reaches the village of Richfield Springs, it is running about twelve feet across. Shallow and filled with rocks, it spills its sometime swamp and baptismal and underground water into Lake Canadarago. It also carries in sulfur from dozens of springs immediately north of the lake. The Oneidas appropriately called this area Ganowanges ("stinking waters").

Richfield Springs adds to the stink, conveying effluent from its wastewater treatment facility into the creek less than a mile above the lake. In the late 1800s, the village built one of the first sewage treatment plants in upstate New York. That relatively primitive plant failed in the 1950s and ’60s. Raw human sewage mixed with the sulfur and wastes from dairy operations and a pea-processing plant to degrade the lake severely and create a rare aromatic experience.

In the early 1970s, Richfield Springs, with state and federal support, constructed one of the nation’s first three tertiary treatment plants, designed to remove nitrogen and phosphorus. This operation eliminated most of the nutrients flowing from the village into the Ocquionis and Canadarago. The quality and clarity of water in the lake improved dramatically.