Down
the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake
by Jack Brubaker
Glaciers scoured out Canadarago and Otsego, its sister lake to the east. The glaciers pushed moraines (boulders, gravel, sand, and other geologic clutter) to the southern ends of these largest natural lakes in the Susquehanna watershed. Meltwater, rapidly filling the two basins, soon breached the lakes’ moraine dams, and they drained down to their approximate present elevations. They continue to drain southward, unlike the better-known Finger Lakes farther west, which drain northward because their southern moraines remain unbreached.
Fed by the Ocquionis and three other tributaries, Canadarago is considerably smaller and shallower than Otsego—about four miles long, one and a quarter miles wide, and, at its greatest depth, 44 feet. Yellow perch, walleye, pike, tiger muskies, pickerel, and large- and smallmouth bass thrive in the comparatively warm water. Searching for the best fishing spots, hundreds of boaters cross wakes on the modest lake each summer.
Except where farmers plow right up to the shoreline, the lake is surrounded by cottages of mixed quality, trailer parks, and motels catering to a seasonal trade that doubles Richfield Springs’ population in July and August. The dense summer population around the lake succeeds an earlier, grander seasonal settlement that centered on the sulfur springs and was confined, for the most part, to the village proper.
At the southern end of Canadarago, water spills over a dam designed to elevate the lake by several feet. The outlet stream is called Oaks Creek. It is a fine fishing stream, filled with brook trout.
Some ten miles south of the lake, Oaks Creek joins the Susquehanna’s North Branch. Just beyond this commingling of waters, this forerunner of all the long, shallow stretches of the Susquehanna can be waded during low flows without wetting the knees.
Lake Otsego
An exclamation of surprise broke from the lips of Deerslayer . . . when on reaching the margin of the lake he beheld the view that unexpectedly met his gaze. . . . On a level with the point lay a broad sheet of water, so placid and limpid, that it resembled a bed of the pure mountain atmosphere compressed into a setting of hills and woods.
—James Fenimore Cooper, describing his hero’s
first sighting of Lake Otsego in The Deerslayer
Willard Harman unfolds a multicolored map of Lake Otsego’s watershed. The watershed, covering seventy-five square miles, is shaped roughly like an inverted triangle, with the bottom point at the Village of Cooperstown. The triangle’s sides angle narrowly from the lake, then spread and run far north of it, deep into the Town of Springfield. All of the water that falls into this area, within northern Otsego County and a small section of eastern Herkimer County, feeds Otsego Lake and, eventually, the Susquehanna.
"We have created two Otsego Lake protection districts," explains Dr. Harman, a professor with the State University of New York College at Oneonta and director of its Biological Field Station on this lake. "One of them is in the proximity of Otsego Lake and has a bunch of restrictions related directly to the lake itself. The other one, more than twice the size of the first, protects the aquifer throughout the Town of Springfield."
A burly biologist with a habit of talking himself nearly out of breath, Bill Harman is the driving force behind regulations on the lake and in its watershed. As a scientist and a member of Springfield’s planning board, he worries as much about pollution entering the springs and ponds and streams north of the lake as he does about more direct degradation.
"Our interest is primarily in the lake," he says. "However, when you have a facility like this, you don’t just stop at the lake. The lake, like the Susquehanna, is not just a hole in the ground with water in it. What comes off the land around it greatly impacts on its character and what lives and doesn’t live there. And so we find ourselves more and more interested in what’s going on in the lake’s watershed, which really is more the headwaters of the Susquehanna than the lake itself is."
Like Lake Canadarago, Otsego is watered by a number of creeks and brooks, most of them growing from swampy sources near the Mohawk-Susquehanna watershed divide.2 One of these swamps, Maumee, lies in Herkimer County, just south of the Jordanville swamp that drains into Canadarago.
Otsego’s primary tributaries are Cripple and Hayden creeks and Shadow Brook, all flowing into the northern end of the lake. The easternmost, Shadow Brook, extends about six miles and has the largest watershed. It flows almost entirely through farmland, picking up significant amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus from manure runoff and transporting them into Otsego. These nutrients undermine the lake’s ecology but have no adverse effect on the enormous carp that spawn each spring at Shadow Brook’s mouth in picturesque Glimmerglass State Park.
In portaging from the Mohawk River to Lake Otsego, the Iroquois followed paths near Shadow Brook. Three Dutch traders probably came this way in 1614, six years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth. These traders began at Albany, canoed up the Mohawk, portaged across to Otsego, and continued down the Susquehanna to Tioga Point. After Native Americans captured and released them, the traders descended the Susquehanna as far as the Wyoming Valley before crossing to the Delaware River and returning to New York.
In 1737, Cadwallader Colden, New York’s surveyor general, noted that goods could be portaged from the Mohawk to Otsego—a distance of fourteen miles—and then transported down the Susquehanna in flat-bottomed boats. George Washington, passing this way in 1783 on a postwar exploring expedition, observed Lake Otsego and the portage path to the Mohawk.
In the 1820s, Governor DeWitt Clinton and others proposed that a canal be constructed to extend from the recently completed Erie Canal (which parallels the Mohawk) along Shadow Brook to Otsego and down the Susquehanna. The plan never attracted widespread support. In the next decade, construction of a superior alternative—the Chenango Canal, connecting the Erie Canal at Utica with Binghamton on the Susquehanna—killed the idea.
page 2©2002 The Penn State University