Tulpehocken Creek (Pennsylvania)

Tulpehocken Creek is a 39.5-mile-long (63.6 km)[1] tributary of the Schuylkill River in southeastern Pennsylvania in the United States, and during the American Canal Age, once provided nearly half the length of the Union Canal linking the port of Philadelphia, the largest American city and the other communities of Delaware Valley with the Susquehanna basin and the Pennsylvania Canal System connecting the Eastern seaboard to Lake Erie and the new settlements of the Northwest Territory via the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers at Pittsburgh.

An important transportation route in the early United States, the creek drains a limestone hill country area of Berks County south of the Appalachian Mountains and is considered one of the finest trout streams in southeastern Pennsylvania.

At Womelsdorf it turns abruptly north, then flows southeast, through the Blue Marsh Lake reservoir and joins the Schuylkill at Reading.

In the 19th century, as it had for the light canoes of the Susquehannock and Delaware peoples, it provided an important early transportation route with the building in 1828 of the Union Canal along the river, connecting from its headwaters to those of Quittapahilla Creek in Lebanon County.

The improvements along Tulpehocken Creek by engineering navigations of the two companies provided nearly half the length of the final Union Canal completed in 1828.