CBM
chesapeake almanac The Susquehanna Flats is home to the Bay's largest underwater grass bed.
Exploring the Lower Susquehanna by John Page Williams
I
t was Capt. John Smith who started the confusion. He and his crew aboard the Discovery Barge thought that at the top end of the Bay they “might see the bay to divide in two heads, and arriving there we found it divided in four, all of which we searched so far as we could sail them,” according to his General History. Those four headwaters are what we know today as the six-mile-wide Susquehanna Flats, comprised of the half-mile mouth of the largest river, which he named for the upriver Susquehannock tribe, and the smaller Northeast, Elk and Sassafras rivers (the last of which Smith came to know by its Native tribe, the Tockwogh). To Smith and his crew, the change certainly looked like a dividing point, with all four rivers deserving of names. The explorers could not have known then that the Bay is actually the tidal lower reach of a waterway that extends hundreds of miles to the North. The unintended result of Smith’s naming process is four centuries of thinking about the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna as two different entities, when they are, ecologically speaking, two sides of the same coin. Fortunately, the Chesapeake Bay Program’s Clean Water Blueprint firmly integrates them in its multi-year restoration partnership.
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September 2020
It’s easy enough to appreciate the relationship with modern mapping systems, but the best way to absorb it is to explore this remarkable transition point by boat. The Susquehanna Flats have caught several millennia of rich sediment from central Pennsylvania and south-central New York. No wonder the area now grows one of the lushest, most diverse beds of underwater grass in the entire Chesapeake system. If you’re thinking of visiting by boat, there’s a marked channel around it. If you’re in an outboard skiff, kayak, or canoe, feel free to carefully explore it. There are actually multiple “shad ditches” cutting through the Flats. The combination of shallow grassbeds and ditches makes the Flats prime habitat for fish such as largemouth bass and yellow perch in warm weather, and migratory waterfowl including canvasbacks and Canada geese in the cold. Meanwhile, the powerful currents of the Susquehanna running through Smith’s Falls, where the river bed drops to sea level, and the deep-though-short tidal river below have formed a conduit for multiple springtime spawning fish, including river herring (both alewives and bluebacks), hickory shad, American shad, white perch, and rockfish. Worldwide, river fall lines and the navigable tidal water below have always drawn commerce, and the Susquehanna is no exception. Smith’s parley with the Susquehannock chiefs took place on the island because that was where their tribe had traditionally come to trade with the Tockwogh. In 1622, Edwin Palmer received a grant for the island from King James I and named it for himself. In 1637, Virginia’s William Claiborne set up an English trading post there, but after the Maryland Colony established its claim
