Talk:White Deer Hole Creek

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Any and all feedback appreciated. Thanks, Ruhrfisch 03:44, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] FA Comments

Just from one editor to another, congratulations on an article largely written by yourself. I'm almost to that level of Wikipedia fluency with my creations, but I still tend to get rocky FA nominations up to a certain point. --Zeality 05:49, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Questions on "Name" section

Note: I have copied the relevant parts of this discussion from the talk pages for myself and MacGyverMagic. Ruhrfisch 17:39, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

"In 1787, Caleb Farley settled on White Deer Hole Creek with his family (including his four year old son John), and built a mill on the creek by 1789."

You usually "settle in" an area. Besides, should you call it by name if Caleb is supposed to be second possible source of the name as suggested in the first paragraph of the section? Also, I can't quite imagine a mill built on a creek. They float like a bunch of rocks :) Could you clarify how this paragraph about Caleb links to the previous one?

Also, perhaps you should say "two etymologies have been suggested" instead of "are given". - Mgm|(talk) 11:08, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for your input. I will change it to "two etymologies have been suggested" and agree that you "settle in" an area.
Perhaps it is an older (archaic?) usage, but people can also "settle on" various bodies of water (in the sense that they settle on the banks of the creek, river, on the shore of a bay, etc.). Meginness (published in 1892 and one reference for the Farley story) uses "settled on White Deer Creek" and a search on Google with "settled on" in quotes and "creek" found many instances of this usage. The same is true for a "mill on a creek" (and one could argue that a water powered mill is at least partly in / on the water itself, though definitely not floating as you pointed out). See also the title of George Eliot's novel The Mill on the Floss (where the Floss is a fictional river). Since it can be confusing, I will change the sentence in question to "settled on the banks of White Deer Hole Creek". I prefer to keep "built a mill on the creek" as that seems to be the preferred usage (and saying "on the banks of" twice would be awkward).
As for the relation between the two paragraphs, they are two different sources that give two different reasons for the name. My interpretation of WP:NOR is that I am not supposed to make a connection between them in the article, unless it is verifiable elsewhere (and it is not that I have found - Donehoo does not mention Meginness, and Meginness does not mention the Lenape name). What I tried to make clear by citing Donehoo's map names is that the earliest map name (1755) is the slightly garbled Lenape words for White Deer Hole Creek. A more corrupted version and its translation are on a slightly later map (1759), and by 1770 "White Deer hole" is the name on maps for good. The land was only opened to non-Native American settlers in 1768 (Treaty of Fort Stanwix) and the earliest settlers are 1769 or 1770, about the same time as the map with the modern name. We don't know a lot about the first settlers as they were all chased out and their homes burnt (and some killed) in the Big Runaway of 1778 and again in the Little Runaway of 1779. The Farley family arrives in 1787, 17 or 18 years after the first settlers, 32 years after the first mention of the Lenape name.
84 or so years later, John Farley talked about his life and related the story of someone killing a white deer near the hole where his father Caleb built the mill. The full quoatation is: "I was four years old when my father came here in 1787. We had plenty of red deer at that time. They could be seen every day when we stepped out of our cabins and went along through the valley or over the mountains. I never saw any white deer here, but a white deer is said to have been killed at an early day in a low hole or pond of water that once existed where my father built his mill, and that was the only white deer ever known in this valley." I think it is worth noting that Farley does not say who killed the deer - it could be a settler or a Native American (so could he perhaps be referring to a Lenape tradition passed down through the previous settlers?).
Sorry to be so long winded. I will make the changes and also put this on the article's talk page. Please ask if there are more questions you have. Thanks again, Ruhrfisch 17:33, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
  • "Settled on" may be proper usage, but for me (non-American) it was confusing so I pointed it out. The connection between the two etymologies should be purely grammatical. You say there's two of them, but you didn't actually state that the story about Caleb is the second one. - Mgm|(talk) 21:54, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
My apologies. Having worked on the article so long I tend to get a bit myopic - thanks very much for pointing out my failure to make the relation of Farley's story to the name clear (especially when I didn't get it the first time you told me). I have edited the section in question and hope it is clearer and more understandable. If it is any consolation, my spouse (who is a native speaker of English) did not know the usage "settled on a creek" when I asked. Thanks again, Ruhrfisch 22:37, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] My edits, and some questions

As I said at FAC, this article is there. But that doesn't mean it can't be improved.

I printed it out and went through it with a red pen. I just got finished implementing my improvements, and here's a brief summary of the general things I did. Mainly these are things to keep in mind for future fascinating articles about minor tributaries of the Susquehanna.

  • Second references: There were a number of times where the same long proper noun ("Tiadaghton State Forest", "Pennsylvania Route 44") was repeatedly and unnecessarily reused. I get the feeling you worked on different sections at a time ... when you do that, before submitting it to PR, GA or FA, it's a good idea to look the whole thing over and see how it plays as a whole. Fortunately there was no repeated information, just terms. Which says a lot for the editor.
  • Wikification: The article now has links to narrow gauge, fish stocks, the whitewater classification system, and "U.S. state", to help better explain those terms when they come up. In many cases they helped tighten up the prose, too ("stocked with trout for fishing" was a little redundant IMO).
  • Proper metric measures. I changed the liters in the sewer plant discharge to cubic meters, which I believe is preferred in that context. Also, I know it's officially considered deprecated but I personally use hectares for land areas less than one square km.
  • "Class A Wild Trout Waters": This is used often enough but the explanation/definition doesn't come until about the third reference. So I moved the definition and reference into the intro.
  • Some general prose awkwardness: "In winter, trails may be used for cross-country skiing and there are dedicated cross-country and snowmobile trails." That sentence says the same thing twice. It reads like some helpful anon dropped in and wanted to say something but couldn't figure out where to put it. So I streamlined it.
  • DMS coordinates in the main text. Absolutely no excuse for that where it's not absolutely necessary. Especially when we have the {{geolinks-US-river}} template for that sort of thing. So I put them and it together under external links.

Now, to two things that I couldn't address:

  • Images: The article isn't lacking for images, and the ones in it are superb ... they make this hiker want to go check it out. But a) if the Mid State Trail allows you to hike up the headwaters beyond the source, would a picture of the source be possible to get with some bushwhacking? I think all our river and stream articles should have a picture of the source if possible (I would also suggest waiting for warmer weather to get some consistency in the pictures. Which, of course, means that in PA you're likely to be getting chewed up by thorn bushes if a significant amount of off-trail is involved. But such are the demands of our wikimuse).

    Also, the article discusses all those leftover bunkers in the last grafs. It's a little dry imagewise there ... it seems like it would be very easy if there are so many to go take a picture of one.

  • Discharge: There's no figure on the creek's discharge. If I didn't know the realities of streamflow measurement, I'd consider that an FA dealbreaker. But I do, and it wouldn't surprise me — well, actually it does given how that stream looks at its mouth — that the USGS hasn't set up a streamflow gauge station at least there. Have there been any attempts over the years to estimate the creek's discharge? If not, at least put something in the infobox explaining that this data point is unmeasured.

Once again, great article that does so many things right (You deserve especial praise, and perhaps a barnstar, for producing an FA with no redlinks whatsoever. Given the local peculiarity of some of the linked articles, that's no mean feat). Daniel Case 20:34, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

    • Thanks very much for your hard work and copyedits. I have a picture of a bunker. I can try to get a photo of the source in the spring. I have never seen any discharge figures and there is no USGS gauge (or even a County flood warning gauge) on the creek. Very briefly I am fine with all but one two of the edits. 1) The archeology was done prior to construction (it was a 6+ acre farm field before it was a sewage treatment plant). 2) There are two kinds of trails - those that are multi use, and those that are dedicated to just snowmobiling or xc skiing. I would like to discuss these more, but I need to respond to an Oppose on the FAC first. Ruhrfisch 04:43, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
    • I do work on sections and I wrote many of the more obscure articles to get rid of redlinks (Pennsylvania Route 44, PA 554, Union County Industrial Railroad, the prison, all the Native American path articles - Sheshequin Path got a DYK). I thought over the trails sentence and am OK with it as revised. I very much prefer "farms (many Amish)" to "farms (primarily Amish)" because even if the Amish have doubled in numbers since 1995, they are still less than half the population. I will add the bunker picture next. Ruhrfisch 04:03, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Changes after FA

After a lot of looking and prompted by Daniel Case's question, I found and added discharge data, as well as two more references on discharge. Ruhrfisch 22:17, 13 December 2006 (UTC)

  • I switched units to {{convert}} wherever possible and switched from {{Infobox River}} to {{Geobox River}}, as well as moving refs and images around to accomodate the larger Geobox. Ruhrfisch 15:32, 10 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minor Problem with Name section

The article says that "John's father Caleb built a mill on the creek by 1789." John's father was, however, actually names John Farley (this older John is one of my ancestors). The source that is given for the information (http://www.usgennet.org/usa/pa/county/lycoming/history/Chapter-39.html) actually agrees with this (it indicates that John's father was John, and that John built the mill).

Also, see ftp://ftp.rootsweb.com/pub/usgenweb/pa/lycoming/history/local/whitedeer.txt, which is a transcription of an article appearing in the "Lycoming Gazette and West Branch Bulletin" in 1870. It contains part of an interview with John Farley (which is what is alluded to in the other source). John says that he "came here into this valley with my father, John Farley, in 1787."

Caleb Farley was a brother of the older John, and actually did come to White Deer Hole Valley (either with John or a few years later). KarlderGroße (talk) 03:10, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

  • Thanks for pointing that out, the Meginness chapter is not as clear as the newspaper transcript, sorry for the error. Ruhrfisch ><>°° 03:21, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Minor math problem

The first sentence of the "Watershed" section says, "The White Deer Hole Creek watershed is in Clinton (0.08%), Lycoming (4.40%), and Union (3.67%) counties." Shouldn't they add up to 100 percent? Finetooth (talk) 22:10, 28 March 2008 (UTC)

I see what must be the correct figures slightly further down (in the third paragraph of the same section). Finetooth (talk) 22:17, 28 March 2008 (UTC)
I have struggled with how to clearly present this information - what is meant is that the White Deer Hole Creek watershed that is in Clinton County is 0.08% of Clinton County, 4.40% of Lycoming Co. is in it, and 3.67% of all of Union County is in it. If you have an idea for how to express this more clearly, I would like to hear it. Thanks, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 02:34, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
How about "The White Deer Hole Creek watershed consists of 0.08 percent of the surface of Clinton County, 4.40 percent of the surface of Lycoming County, and 3.67 percent of the surface of Union County"? Finetooth (talk) 04:35, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I like the idea, but would you be OK with "surface area" or even just "area" instead of just "surface"? Ruhrfisch ><>°° 04:39, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
Sure. Either would be fine. Perhaps plain "area" is best. This brings a peculiar thought to mind. In a place with a great deal of vertical relief, the actual surface would be much bigger than the land's length times its width. I wonder if topographers have a name for that other measurement, a land's surface as opposed to its simple geometric area? Finetooth (talk) 04:51, 29 March 2008 (UTC)
I will change it just plain area, thanks. My guess is that there are several specialist terms (although I don't know them). Rivers have River miles (distance from where a tributary enters the main stem to the mouth of the main stem) for example. They also have relief ratio and meander ratio (see meander). Ruhrfisch ><>°° 10:54, 29 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Map

I found this creek on Reading Howell's 1792 Map Of The State Of Pennsylvania. Would it be worth mentioning or linking to this map in the article? According to the host, the images are available under cc-by-sa, so we should even be able to upload them to commons. –Sarregouset (talk) 23:48, 2 June 2008 (UTC)

  • Thanks - since the map is from 1792 the copyright has long since expired, so I would use {{pd-old}} and give the full source. FYI, I reverted your edit to the article because the unnamed tributaries are entirely in the named features. The chnge made it sound as if they started in them and flowed out. If you look at USGS GNIS the origin of the gap is about where the trib enters the main creek Fourth Gap Ruhrfisch ><>°° 00:07, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
You're right about the copyright; I'll work at uploading it. And thanks for mentioning your revert, as I was going to question you. Perhaps I didn't use the best wording, but that sentence really confused me. Would 'flow through' be more suitable than 'originate'? Also, that was not the only change I made, as I noted in my edit summary. The list of animal names at the end of the article alternates between singular and plural forms, and it seems 'squirrel' (and 'hawk', I just noticed) should be capitalized for consistency. –Sarregouset (talk) 00:20, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
I use popups and previewed the changes you made but did not look at it as a full diff. In the process I only saw the first part and missed all of your later plural edits, sorry. I am fine with flow through. Although this article is FA, updating parts of it is on my short term list of things to do - there was a CCC camp west of Elimsport that built many of the forest roads and paths in the watershed (need to add this and the ref), I need to update the Infobox to a Geobox, and I was going to be consistent about species names being capitalized but other plant and animal names not being capitalized (so White-tailed deer but trout). Please feel free to tweak the description of the gap tribs and pluralize names. Sorry for the confusion, Ruhrfisch ><>°° 01:00, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
I figured that's what happened, but I'm glad we resolved it. I put my changes back; right now all the names are capitalized, but you're right non-species names could be lowercase if it's consistent. By the way, I'm having trouble uploading the map, as it's 160 MB right now, so it won't be up tonight. I'll have to crop to the area we're interested in. –Sarregouset (talk) 01:29, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
Thanks. Hopefully I can do my cleanups in the next week or less. Yes please upload the map or a section of it, Commons has a size limit of 20 MB, IIRC. The article already mentions Scull's map and a few others (in Donehoo's book) in the Name section. I like the map - could it be an External link and in Commons? Ruhrfisch ><>°° 01:37, 3 June 2008 (UTC)