The beauty of this area attracted the attention of literary personages like Edgar Allan Poe and John Greenleaf Whittier.

As the ravine widens into the Cresheim, the waters gather in a basin surrounded on either side by rocky outcroppings before flowing into the Wissahickon Creek.

[6] Although it is not legal due to unsafe levels of pollutants, Devil's pool has become a popular area to swim, lounge, and drink.

This Precambrian to Cambrian stone, first studied in the Wissahickon gorge, has flecks of glittery mica, small garnets, and many-toned shadings of gray, brown, tan, and blue, and is attractive enough to have become a common building material in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Both schist and quartzite are metamorphic rocks formed from sedimentary deposits of mud and sand that one time were washed from ancient continents into a shallow sea.

In 1694, Johannes Kelpius arrived in Philadelphia with a group of like-minded German Pietists to live in the valley of the Wissahickon Creek.

No sign or revelation accompanied that year, but the faithful continued to live in celibacy by the stream, searching the stars and hoping for the end.

The structure, used for church retreats, still stands today, and is known as The Monastery, a remaining witness to the Wissahickon's days as an isolated religious refuge.

One miller had by 1690 already constructed a dam, sawmill, gristmill, and house by the narrow shelf of land at the confluence of the Wissahickon with the Schuylkill River, but the rugged terrain of the valley forestalled further development alongside the stream itself.

The nature of the rugged terrain can be comprehended in an event that had occurred during the Revolutionary War Battle of Germantown, which was fought not too far from the stream.

The American General John Armstrong, compelled by the rough terrain to abandon a cannon in the valley, expressed his contempt for the "horrendous hills of the Wissahickon."

Seeking to prevent the stream's industrial discharges from affecting the purity of the water of the Schuylkill River, the Fairmount Park Commission took title of much of the land along the Wissahickon in 1869-1870, and continued to expand its holdings in subsequent decades.

In 1924, area residents formed the non-profit group "Friends of the Wissahickon", which still works to maintain the park's unique landscape to this day.

The park here is a ruggedly beautiful valley for the naturalists, artists, fishermen, bicyclists, equestrians, and hikers who are drawn to the wooded, steep banks of the stream.

Among the earliest references to the valley was by William Cobbett in his book Rural Rides, which takes the form of a series of letters.

Except the setting-sun sending his horizontal beams through all the variety of reds and yellows of the branches of the trees in Long Island, and giving, at the same time, a sort of silver cast to the verdure beneath them, I have never seen anything so beautiful as the foggy valley of the Wysihicken.

Her description of the gorge's dramatic end at the stream's confluence with the Schuylkill River and her verse To the Wissahickon both sparked a keen interest in this natural treasure often overlooked by its neighbors.

She wrote: The thick, bright, rich-tufted cedars, basking in the warm amber glow, the picturesque mill, the smooth open field, along whose side the river waters, after receiving this child of the mountains into their bosom, wound deep, and bright, and still, the whole radiant with the softest light I ever beheld, formed a most enchanting and serene subject of contemplation.Edgar Allan Poe alluded to Fanny Kemble's writing in his description of a beautiful Wissahickon valley in his 1844 essay "Morning on the Wissahiccon", in which he wrote: Now the Wissahiccon is of so remarkable a loveliness that, were it flowing in England, it would be the theme of every bard, and the common topic of every tongue, if, indeed, its banks were not parcelled off in lots, at an exorbitant price, as building-sites for the villas of the opulent.

Its banks are generally, indeed almost universally, precipitous, and consist of high hills, clothed with noble shrubbery near the water, and crowned at a greater elevation, with some of the most magnificent forest trees of America, among which stands conspicuous the liriodendron tulipiferum.

The immediate shores, however, are of granite, sharply defined or moss-covered, against which the pellucid water lolls in its gentle flow, as the blue waves of the Mediterranean upon the steps of her palaces of marble.The erratic and almost forgotten novelist George Lippard frequently wrote about the Wissahickon, and was even married at sunset on or around May 14, 1847, on a rocky crag called Mom Rinker's Rock, overlooking the stream.

Deep in the woods, where the small river slid Snake-like in shape, the Helmstadt mystic hid, Weird as a wizard over arts forbid.

Lippard, in his Legends of Washington and his Generals, has rendered the Wissahickon sacred in my eyes, and I shall make that trip, as well as one to Germantown, soon ..." Ron P. Swegman, a fly fishing angler, artist, and author, wrote extensively about Wissahickon Creek in two illustrated essay collections, Philadelphia on the Fly (Frank Amato Publications, 2005)[17] and Small Fry: The Lure of the Little (The Whitefish Press, 2009).

Artists have portrayed the stream and its valley: There exists a Currier and Ives Scenery Of The Wissahickon[34] The Swann Memorial Fountain (1924), a fountain sculpture by Alexander Stirling Calder that is located in the center of Logan Circle, also known by its historic name Logan Square, in Philadelphia, contains three large Native American figures that symbolize the area's major streams: the Delaware, the Schuylkill, and the Wissahickon.