One person was killed and a child was injured following a crash Monday morning in Caernarvon Township, according to Lancaster County-Wide Communications.
The section of the Conestoga upstream from the city of Lancaster often is called a âcreek.â Below the city, the waterway is called either a âcreekâ or a âriver.â
The Scribbler learned this by reading a new book, âThe Conestoga River: A History,â written by Donald Kautz and published by The History Press.
These designations make some sense because the beginning of the 60-mile-long Conestoga is narrow and shallow and creek-like, and the ending is wider and shallow and river-like.
But âcreekâ is an informal designation for any part of the Conestoga. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names officially determined that the Conestoga is a âriverâ in the early 1970s. So if you find the Conestoga referred to as a âcreekâ on more recent maps, you have found a mistake.