Tiber Creek

Tiber Creek or Tyber Creek was a tributary of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C.

Originally called 'Goose Creek', it was renamed by settler Francis Pope. Pope owned a 400-acre (1.6 km²) farmstead along the banks of the creek which, in a play on his surname, he named "Rome" after the Italian city, and he renamed the creek in honor of the river which flows through that city. It was southeast of then Georgetown, Maryland, amid lands that were selected for the City of Washington, the new capital of the United States. It flowed south toward the base of Capitol Hill, then west meeting the Potomac near Jefferson Pier.

History

Using the original Tiber Creek for commercial purposes was part of Pierre (Peter) Charles L'Enfant's 1791 "Plan of the city intended for the permanent seat of the government of the United States . . .". The idea was that the creek could be widened and channeled into a canal to the Potomac. And so by 1815 part of it became a portion of the Washington City Canal, running along what is now Constitution Avenue. By the 1870s, however, because Washington had no separate storm drain and sewer system, the Washington City Canal was notoriously stinky. It had become an open sewer. When Alexander "Boss" Shepherd joined the Board of Public Works in 1871, he and the Board engaged in a massive, albeit uneven, series of infrastructure improvements, including grading and paving streets, planting trees, installing sewers and laying out parks. One of these projects was to enclose Tiber Creek/Washington City Canal. A German immigrant engineer named Adolf Cluss, also on the Board, is credited with constructing a tunnel from Capitol Hill to the Potomac "wide enough for a bus to drive through to put Tiber Creek underground."