Inky Stinky

The Codorus Creek runs through the center of York, entering the city from the northwest and bending through downtown before continuing south toward the Susquehanna River. The creek is why York exists. Thomas Cookson chose this site in seventeen forty-one partly because the Codorus offered waterpower for mills, a dependable source to drive the grist mills and sawmills and tanneries that a new town would need.

For a century and more, the creek served as industrial backbone and open sewer simultaneously. In eighteen sixteen, York Water Company began distributing fresh water through wooden pipes, an early sign that the Codorus was already too fouled for reliable drinking. By the time the twentieth century arrived, the creek had acquired a nickname.

People called it Inky Stinky. By some accounts in the nineteen sixties, twenty-two of every forty industrial sites along its banks discharged waste directly into the water. Flooding was a separate danger.

In eighteen seventeen, ten people died in a Codorus flood. The Chesapeake-Potomac Hurricane of nineteen thirty-three brought thirteen to seventeen inches of rain over York County, and the flood peak that year reached thirty-two thousand cubic feet per second. Tropical Storm Agnes in nineteen seventy-two added sixteen more inches and killed four people.

The Army Corps of Engineers answered with infrastructure: the Indian Rock Dam, completed in nineteen forty-two, and a system of flood control levees and pump stations finished in nineteen eighty. The creek today is the subject of a greenway restoration project that aims to return it to something more like what it was before the mills arrived.