Папакатинский ручей: История и экологическое состояние в Нью-Джерси.

Creek in Sussex County, New Jersey, U. S.

Papakating Creek is a 20.1 mile (32 km) tributary of the Wallkill River located in Frankford and Wantage townships in Sussex County, New Jersey in the United States. The creek rises in a small swamp located beneath the eastern face of Kittatinny Mountain in Frankford and its waters join the Wallkill to the east of Sussex borough. Papakating Creek and its three major tributaries drain the northern portion of New Jersey's Kittatinny Valley a fertile valley underlain by shale and limestone of the Ordovician Martinsburg Formation and soils deposited by retreating glaciers in the last ice age. The region which the Papakating Creek and its tributaries drain is largely rural farmland and forests with a few low density residential communities. The New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection reports that phosphorus and fecal coliform from agricultural or residential runoff as well as arsenic from agricultural pesticide applications or regional mineralogy impair the creek. Within the watershed are lands belonging to two state parks, one federal wildlife refuge, and preserves managed by the New Jersey Natural Lands Trust which set aside tracts for wildlife habitats that protect unique ecosystems and some threatened species.

On June 29, 1897, the United States Geological Surveys Board of Geographic Names approved the toponym Papakating for a creek in northwestern New Jersey. Papakating is derived from the language spoken by the Munsee (the northern branch of the Lenape or Delaware Indians) who inhabited northern New Jersey, northeastern Pennsylvania, and southern New York and western Long Island at the time of European settlement of eastern seaboard of the United States. The name Papakating, and several variant spellings, had been recorded for the creek consistently since the American colonial period. Maps and documents at the time of the American Revolution often render the name as Pepocottin or Pepper Cotton. The name was used for both the creek and its valley, and subsequently during the nineteenth century for a small hamlet that later gave its name to a post office and train depot. The post office was authorized as "Pepokating" on August 26, 1851 and the name revised to the more common spelling of Papakating in 1862. Service to this post office was discontinued in 1923. Today, the site of a confluence between an unnamed tributary and the Papakating Creek is known as Pellettown and the Board of Geographic Names lists Pellet Creek and Pellettown Creek as historical names that have been used for the creek in the past. Pellet established house, grist mill, blacksmith shop and store by 1812, and "the site of these activities was known as Pepocotting (became Papakating), after the stream on which they had located, but gradually adopted the name Pellettown". His son Stephen J. Pellet (1820–1886), a local farmer, merchant, and Justice of the Peace who was appointed the first postmaster of the Papakating post office operating in his store. Today, the Papakating Creek and its watershed is rural in character; consisting of farmland, forests, and wetlands. There are a few low density communities. Several of the tributaries of the Papakating Creek have been dammed to create man made lakes that were the centre of residential developments. in 1926, a dam was erected on Clove Creek in Sussex Borough to create Clove Acres Lake at the site of a former horse racing track and picnic spot. The lake was developed into a lakeside community in that straddles the border between Sussex and Wantage Township. In the 1950s, Lake Neepaulin in Wantage Township was created by damming an unnamed mountain stream. In 2002, local residents of the Lake Neepaulin community decided to name the unnamed tributary Neepaulakating Creek from a combination of elements of the names Neepaulin and Papakating. Despite its seemingly Native American appearance, Neepaulin is not derived from Munsee or any other Native American language. Lake Neepaulin was named after a combination of the original developers children's names. The Board of Geographic Names approved the name on April 8, 2004.

The headwaters of Papakating Creek are located at 900 feet (274 m) above sea level in Frankford Township, New Jersey. The stream begins in a small swamp at the foot of Kittatinny Mountain, immediately beneath a prominence along that ridge known as Sunrise Mountain, elevation 1,650 feet (503 m). This source is located in the northernmost corner of Frankford Township, approximately 1 mile (2 km) west of the hamlet of Beemerville in Wantage Township. From the source, the Papakating flows southeast through Frankford Township north of the borough of Branchville. Flowing northeast, the Papakating passes through a series of named crossroads or small hamlets, including Armstrong and Pellettown in Frankford. The stream meanders through several miles of farmland along the floor of Kittatinny Valley. At Pellettown, formerly known as Papakating, the creek is joined by an unnamed tributary and passes under the path of County Route 565. This line was later operated by the Lehigh and New England Railroad until 1961.

Papakting Creek drains a watershed of 60.6 square miles (157 km2) or in area. It includes portions of Frankford, Lafayette, Montague, and Wantage Townships, as well as all of Sussex Borough. According to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP), the watershed consists of gently sloping agricultural farm fields, wooded forests, wetlands, low density residential development and older individually built homes. According to 2002 figures, the watershed was estimated to be home to approximately 11,602 residents of Sussex County. The Martinsburg Formation is a two mile thick (3.2 km) layer of a thick turbidite sequence of weaker sedimentary materials, mostly slate, greywacke sandstone, shale, and limestone derived from Ordovician period deep ocean floor deposits (540 to 400 million years ago). The creek's watershed is located in the northern Kittatinny Valley in New Jersey which is a segment of the Great Appalachian Valley, a 1,200 miles (1,900 km) trough spanning from Quebec to Alabama. Elevations within the Kittatinny Valley range from 400 feet (122 m) to 1000 feet (305 m). In New Jersey, the northern portion of Kittatinny Valley is drained by the watershed of the Wallkill River of which Papakating Creek is a tributary. Its southern portion is drained by Paulins Kill and Pequest River.

Several large tracts of land within the Papakating watershed are protected areas administered by state and federal governments. Segments of land along the eastern face Kittatinny Mountain are located within the boundaries of High Point State Park and Stokes State Forest. These areas allow for recreational activities including fishing, hunting, hiking, mountain biking, horseback riding, and birdwatching. Further, Papakating Creek is stocked with several species of trout (brook, brown, and rainbow) in the Spring and early Summer by the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife for recreational fishing. The New Jersey Natural Lands Trust states that the Papakating Creek watershed offers a variety of habitats for plants and animals, including several that are designated threatened or endangered by the state and federal governments. These habitats include:
Meadows and pastures offer grassland habitat for songbirds and hunting opportunity for red tailed hawks. The forest lands of ash, maple and hemlock provide cool, shaded conditions to the slow moving creek. Here, raccoon, mink and possum make bridges of the numerous fallen trees which cross the creek. Wood frog and salamander utilize fringes of some of the smaller wetlands. Painted turtles and bluegills swim within the deeper oxbows and pools along the Papakating Creek. In 2010, the Trust for Public Land finalized the purchase of the Armstrong Bog which was described as a rare Calcareous fen wetland site in order to aid the "recovery of the federal threatened and state endangered bog turtle" (Glyptemys muhlenbergii), and preserve "plant habitat for the rare Fraser's Saint John's wort" (Triadenum fraseri). The bog is described as a wet meadow that features the pinkish purple flowers of New York ironweed and Joe Pye weed in late summer and that "woodchucks have dug their dens on the gently sloping edge between the forest and the old corn field". A smaller parcel features streamside wetlands of arrowwood and elderberry which provides "habitat ideal for wood turtles and yellow throated warblers".