Maumee River

The Maumee River (pronounced /mɔːˈmiː/) (Shawnee: Hotaawathiipi) is a river running from northeastern Indiana into northwestern Ohio and Lake Erie in the United States. It is formed at the confluence of the St. Joseph and St. Marys rivers, where Fort Wayne, Indiana has developed, and meanders northeastwardly for 137 miles (220 km) through an agricultural region of glacial moraines before flowing into the Maumee Bay of Lake Erie. Toledo, Ohio developed at the Maumee River's mouth. It was designated an Ohio State Scenic River on July 18, 1974. The Maumee watershed is Ohio’s breadbasket, two-thirds farmland, mostly corn and soybeans. The Maumee watershed is the largest of any of the rivers feeding the Great Lakes, and supplies 5 percent of Lake Erie’s water.

History

Historically the river was also known as the "Miami" in United States treaties with Native Americans. As early as 1671, French colonists called the river was called Miami du Lac, or Miami of the Lake (in contrast to the "Miami of the Ohio" or the Great Miami River). Maumee is an anglicized spelling of the Ottawa or Odawa name for the Miami Indians, Maamii. The Odawa had a village at the mouth of the Maumee River and occupied other territory in northwestern Ohio.

St. Joseph River (Maumee River)

The St. Joseph River is an 86.1-mile-long (138.6 km) tributary of the Maumee River in northwestern Ohio, and northeastern Indiana in the United States, with headwater tributaries rising in southern Michigan. It drains a primarily rural farming region in the watershed of Lake Erie. It shares its name with the St. Joseph River of Lake Michigan, but the two rivers flow in generally opposite directions.

Origin

At the end of the Wisconsin glaciation, the glacier's Erie Lobe retreated toward the northeast, leaving large debris deposits called moraines. The St. Joseph formed as a meltwater channel between the north limbs of two of these moraines, the Wabash Moraine on the west and the Fort Wayne Moraine on the east. At that time it joined the St. Marys River to drain into the Wabash River. Later, the shrinkage of Glacial Lake Maumee, the ancestor of modern Lake Erie, brought about the opening of the modern Maumee River, which captured the flow of the St. Joseph and the St. Marys, causing the St. Marys to reverse its course to meet the flow of the St. Joseph almost head-on.

St. Joseph River

The St. Joseph River may refer to:

St. Joseph River (Michigan)

St. Joseph River may refer to the following streams in the U.S. state of Michigan:

St. Joseph River (Lake Michigan)

The St. Joseph River (known locally as the St. Joe) is a river, approximately 206 miles (332 km) long, in southern Michigan and northern Indiana in the United States. It drains a primarily rural farming area in the watershed of Lake Michigan. It was enormously important to Native Americans and greatly aided in the colonial exploration, settlement and administration of New France and the nascent United States as a canoe route between Lake Michigan and the watershed of the Mississippi River.

Description of the watershed

The St. Joseph River watershed drains 4,685 square miles (12,130 km²) from 15 counties: Berrien, Branch, Calhoun, Cass, Hillsdale, Kalamazoo, St. Joseph and Van Buren in Michigan and De Kalb, Elkhart, Kosciusko, LaGrange, Noble, St. Joseph and Steuben in Indiana. The watershed includes 3,742 river miles (6,022 km) and flows through and near the Kalamazoo-Portage, Elkhart-Goshen, Mishawaka-South Bend, and St. Joseph/Benton Harbor metropolitan areas. The St. Joseph River main stem is 206 miles (332 km) long, rising in southern Michigan in Hillsdale County near Baw Beese Lake, within 5 miles (8 km) of the headwaters of the other St. Joseph River of the eastward-flowing Maumee River watershed. Baw Beese Lake was historically named for the Potawatomi Chief Baw Beese.