Talk:Allegheny River

Name origin and spelling
I rewrote a recently added bit about the origin of the word "Allegheny". A blog was used as a reference, which goes against WP:RS. I also moved the info to the intro rather than a "trivia" section. The name's origin doesn't seem trivial to me, specially since it gave rise to many hundreds of other places and regions named Allegheny.

I also added a "citation needed" to the claim that the river is sometimes spelled "Allegany". While there are several ways of spelling the word, they apply to other things with that named -- counties, mountains, and so on. The river itself is just the Allegheny River as far as I know. Every map I can find shows the name as "Allegheny", including New York specific maps. The USGS GNIS placename database usually lists variant names, but gives none at all for the Allegheny River.

I also added a References section -- the page could use some! Pfly 05:16, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Locks, dams, pools, and islands
I would like to request a chart under a Locks and Dams section for the eight L/D on the Allegheny River. Also, a list of islands navigational template would be a nice addition; there are already articles about some of the islands. The following article stubs need created:


 * Locks and dams


 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam One (historical; was near the H. J. Heinz Company, and made redundant by the Emsworth Locks and Dam on the Ohio River)
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Two
 * C. W. Bill Young Lock and Dam / Allegheny River Lock and Dam Three (redirect)
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Four
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Five
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Six
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Seven
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Eight
 * Allegheny River Lock and Dam Nine


 * Pools


 * Allegheny River Pool Two
 * Allegheny River Pool Three
 * Allegheny River Pool Four
 * Allegheny River Pool Five
 * Allegheny River Pool Six
 * Allegheny River Pool Seven
 * Allegheny River Pool Eight
 * Allegheny River Pool Nine

Note: The above redlinks (except the first) are per Geographic Names Information System (GNIS).


 * Islands

~ All is One ~ (talk) 19:01, 10 April 2009 (UTC)

the only information of importance, is completely absent, information on pollution levels, wildlife, fish health, etc.
can somebody write about the RIVER and not about how it got its name or what states it winds through. How about the water test results? how about wildlife? how about fish and other life that exist in it? is it even swimmable? Is it a toxic cess pool? I have no clue, can somebody with this information please write more about this very pertinent subject. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.108.114.107 (talk) 12:19, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Coordinate error
The following coordinate fixes are needed for

Allegheny River. Its suppose to be,  41°52'34.62" N  77°52'19.28" W

The coordinates you give are for the basic TOWN the head waters are in. I canoed the entire Allegheny River with a friend. I was there and found the head source and verified it with a guy that does GEO catching in that area. I had stood in the spot of where the Allegheny River seeps out of the ground and took a GPS reading.If you would like to see for yourself the beginning of the Allegheny River you can Google Earth it. After I came home and was still thinking about the river I was wondering. How do they find rivers that have disappeared thousands of years ago? They look at it from AFAR! So I Google it and sure enough when you zoom out you can see the cut in the land. Here’s how to Google it and see for yourself. You can’t see the hole in the ground or the marsh/ pond part; but you can see where it goes. So the fire trail and a cleared path intersect almost at the top but you can still see it. If you Google it you can see how the river goes under Rt. 49 there. Going north you can see a clear cut in the land going through a pasture and then into a woods then up and up. It gets fainter but it crosses the fire trail and clearing and it looks like it stops at the road. It goes under the road and right on the other side is the hole right on the edge of the woods and farmer’s field. The water seeps out of the ground and depending on the water table it can either be moist there to like a pond. It is just a tad south of the intersection of Ben Green Road and Cobb Hill Road. In the book “The Allegheny River, Watershed of the Nation” Two men Jim Schafer and Mike Sajna chronicle life and times on the Allegheny River. Here they too follow the river up to the spring to this very spot. SOME people claim it starts at some white pipes on the hill but it is just a feeder stream. After talking to the guys in Harrisburg from the Geology dept it was verified that that was it. SO here are the correct coordinates for the HEAD of the Allegheny River. I also wrote a book about my trips. Not only did I canoe the entire Allegheny River and the Monongahela River with a friend I canoed the entire Ohio river by myself. well I did have my dog Angel with me. The book is called "A River Runs Through Me" and it will be out soon and you can verify I did what I said I did. Thank you. Kim Cornell.

Allegheny River Lover (talk) 22:11, 2 March 2013 (UTC)Kim Cornell


 * ❌. The coordinates currently in the article match the location of the river's source as shown on the USGS topographical map, as you can see here, which is about 1,000 feet to the southwest of the point you've indicated. We have to go with a source like that in the absence of a more authoritative one. If you can provide a reliable published source giving the coordinates as you've stated, feel free to repost your request on this page, and it will be reconsidered. (I've removed your phone number above to protect your privacy.) Deor (talk) 00:13, 3 March 2013 (UTC)
 * ❌ USGS data is the gold standard for this. It's based on aerial surveys, or satellite photos these days.  They usually are not individually published except as part of the data set. Challenging the USGS is the proper way to get it corrected.  Unless you're a recognized authority in the field, that's a tough proposition.  I've done research on other rivers, and there's a certain amount of arbitrariness in where to locate a river's source.  The definition I use is "the headwaters of a river are the furthest point upstream from the mouth along the main stream where water always or almost always runs in a fixed channel."  There has to be enough water to identify a permanent course, an eroded channel, and have non-seasonal directionality.  In my experience, the headwaters are often in places where the underground aquafers are close to the surface resulting in standing groundwater much of the time, sometimes with springs.  While these may be the true water source, the beginning of the stream/river is usually marked where water flows in a fixed channel.  The problem is stark in endorheic desert basins, where there's little standing or running water, but large periodic floods during a short wet season. The non-seasonal headwaters can be a hundred miles from some raging but temporary river in a perimeter gorge. Sbalfour (talk) 20:33, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Settlements and political subdivisions
Both of these lists are inane. The real problem is lack of meaningful inclusion/exclusion criteria. One could be to include only places with a population of at least 25,000, i.e. putative towns. Townships don't ordinarily appear on roadmaps, topo maps or hydrological maps (this is a river article, after all), and aren't meaningful. And any place without at least a wiki article of its own isn't notable enough to include here. The last paragraph of Course section is also a list of inconsequential populated places. And all three list duplicate each other almost in their entirety. Applying those criteria knocks out about 95% of the lists. Do it to it. Sbalfour (talk) 16:38, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Plum, PA, a borough of 27,000 people, was listed as being on the river - it is not. The nearest passage of the river is three miles from Plum. The only city > 25,000 people on the river is Pittsburgh. Using tiny unknown towns to demarcate a world famous 325-mile long natural resource is just dubious.


 * Your assertion about Plum is not correct. (The same info can be confirmed via The National Map by ticking the "Incorporated places" layer, which will display the same municipal boundary as on Google Maps.)


 * I have restored the list of populated places you deleted. Embedded lists are widely used on Wikipedia, particularly for long sequences, as in the case of a list of populated places along a river. There has been a longstanding consensus in favor of including such lists in articles about rivers; if a list becomes extraordinarily long (I don't think this one is at this point), it can be broken out into a separate article. Their inclusion is appropriate to Wikipedia's role as a gazetteer, and the provision of robust links to articles about related topics (such as political jurisdictions that border or include the river, as in this case) is one of the great strengths of Wikipedia. I also don't think a personal opinion that any place below an arbitrary (and personally chosen) population threshold is "inconsequential," or that townships aren't "meaningful" (they do appear on Google Maps and have Wikipedia articles, and local governments), is a good enough reason to sweepingly delete this content entirely. Thanks-- TimK MSI (talk) 00:34, 10 March 2019 (UTC)

headwaters
The text says the headwaters are on Cobb Hill pointing to Alleghany Township (uncited). USGS data place the Eastern Triple Divide just about 2 miles south of Gold in Ulysses Township, a bit more than a mile east of the Alleghany township line (Cobb Hill is 2 miles west of Gold). The place is an unnamed summit called locally 'Triple Divide Peak'. The spot is near the intersection of Kidney and Rooks roads in that township. USGS coordinates only have resolution +-100ft. Sbalfour (talk) 20:54, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

It's curious that the headwaters are marked ~2.8 miles northwest of the divide. That's quite a ways. Of course, there's no standing water at the divide - it's a summit.Sbalfour (talk) 16:28, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Course
The course description is long-winded and distracting with all the city names. Here: The course of the river is a zigzag of 5 segments from the headwaters in north central Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh, 178 miles (325 river miles) to the southwest: from the headwaters at Cobb Hill in Alleghany township 5.5 miles west-by-southwest of the borough of Ulysses, west across the Potter County line, northwest across the New York state line to Salamanca, southwest reentering Pennsylvania to Franklin, southeast to Templeton, and finally southwest to its confluence with the Monongahela River in Point State Park in Downtown Pittsburgh. If one wants to locate the river via cities, that's how to do it. Is that not perfectly clear? There's no question that the river can be located from any one of the 'corner' towns which are directly on the river. One drawback is that Templeton and Ulysses are tiny towns, not on printed roadmaps. And they're all small towns not likely to be known outside their respective counties.

Here's better, I think, using counties: The county sequence is southwest thru western Potter into eastern McKean, then northwest and southwest thru southern Cattaraugus (NY) around northern Alleghen National Forest, western McKean, Warren, western Forest, to central Vernango; then southeast thru Vernango andClarion to northern Armstrong; then southeast thru Allegheny & Westmooreland. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbalfour (talk • contribs) 22:51, 4 March 2019 (UTC)

Etymology footnote
Footnote #4 is a mega-note. I think we should either condense and include it in the Etymology section or get rid of it. Sbalfour (talk) 23:25, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Etymology non-reference footnote
I've moved this here for now, as it is not properly a reference, and is confusing about exactly what the ref that supports the statement is. I think the note should either be in the article as text, or not in the article (i.e. superfluous?). Sbalfour (talk) 16:56, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Alleghany, or as some prefer to write it, Allegheny,—the Algonkin name of the Ohio River, but now restricted to one of its branches,—is probably (Delaware) welhik-hanné or [oo]lik-hanné, 'the best (or, the fairest) river.' Welhik (as Zeisberger wrote it) is the inanimate form of the adjectival, meaning 'best,' 'most beautiful.' In his Vocabulary, Zeisberger gave this synthesis, with slight change of orthography, as "Wulach'neü" [or [oo]lakhanne[oo], as Eliot would have written it,] with the free translation, "a fine River, without Falls." The name was indeed more likely to belong to rivers 'without falls' or other obstruction to the passage of canoes, but its literal meaning is, as its composition shows, "best rapid-stream," or "finest rapid-stream;" "La Belle Riviere" of the French, and the Oue-yo´ or O hee´ yo Gä-hun´-dä, "good river" or "the beautiful river," of the Senecas. For this translation of the name we have very respectable authority,—that of Christian Frederick Post, a Moravian of Pennsylvania, who lived seventeen years with the Muhhekan Indians and was twice married among them, and whose knowledge of the Indian languages enabled him to render important services to the colony, as a negotiator with the Delawares and Shawanese of the Ohio, in the French war. In his "Journal from Philadelphia to the Ohio" in 1758, after mention of the 'Alleghenny' river, he says: "The Ohio, as it is called by the Sennecas. Alleghenny is the name of the same river in the Delaware language. Both words signify the fine or fair river." La Metairie, the notary of La Salle's expedition, "calls the Ohio, the Olighinsipou, or Aleghin; evidently an Algonkin name,"—as Dr. Shea remarks. Heckewelder says that the Delawares "still call the Allegany (Ohio) river, Alligéwi Sipu,"—"the river of the Alligewi" as he chooses to translate it. In one form, we have wulik-hannésipu, 'best rapid-stream long-river;' in the other, wuliké-sipu, 'best long-river.' Heckewelder's derivation of the name, on the authority of a Delaware legend, from the mythic 'Alligewi' or 'Talligewi,'—"a race of Indians said to have once inhabited that country," who, after great battles fought in pre-historic times, were driven from it by the all-conquering Delawares,—is of no value, unless supported by other testimony.