Cohoquinoque Creek

This small tributary of the Delaware River remains today, as a sewer, under Willow Street, which winds its way through what is sometimes called the East Callowhill Industrial District.

Pegg in 1686 acquired three hundred and fifty acres of marshy ground in that area from one Jurian Hartsfelder, who held a patent on the land dating back years before the arrival of William Penn.

The following accounts indicate how bad the situation was: A small stream of water, called Pegg's Run, passes through a portion of the Northern Liberties and Spring Garden, which, until a few years ago, was left open and unimproved.

Receiving the offals of very many slaughter-houses, lanyards, glue, starch, dressed skin, and soap manufactories adjoining it, as well as the contents of two culverts, of a large number of privies, and of the gutters of the numerous populous streets and alleys it crosses, it became highly offensive, and the source of noxious exhalations.

This stream, which plays a conspicuous part in the history of one of the epidemics, and was correctly pronounced the greatest nuisance in Philadelphia, attracted finally the attention of the public and council, and has since been culverted.

Except during the heavy rains, or immediately after them, the stream is barely sufficient to carry along, with a sluggish current, the mass of decomposing, offensive substances that compose it, for in fact, it seems more like liquid mud than water."

--From Report of the Philadelphia Relief Committee Appointed to Collect Funds for the Sufferers by Yellow Fever, At Norfolk & Portsmouth, Va., 1855 (Inquirer Printing Office, 1856), at 27-28.

After the sewer was built, the tanners and other industries along the way obtained entrances into it, and thus continued discharging their wastes into the covered stream and out into the nearby Delaware River.