The source of the North Branch Potomac River is at the Fairfax Stone located at the junction of Grant, Tucker and Preston counties in West Virginia.
From the Fairfax Stone, the North Branch Potomac River flows 27 miles (43 km) to the man-made Jennings Randolph Lake, an impoundment designed for flood control and emergency water supply. Below the dam, the North Branch cuts a serpentine path through the eastern Allegheny Mountains. First, it flows northeast by the communities of Bloomington, Luke, and Westernport in Maryland and then on by Keyser, West Virginia to Cumberland, Maryland. At Cumberland, the river turns southeast. 103 miles (166 km) downstream from its source, the North Branch is joined by the South Branch between Green Spring and South Branch Depot, West Virginia from whence it flows past Hancock, Maryland and turns southeast once more on its way toward Washington, D.C., and the Chesapeake Bay.
The following are tributaries of the North Branch Potomac River, listed in order from the source to its mouth.
- Stony River (West Virginia)
- Abram Creek (West Virginia)
- Savage River (Maryland)
- Georges Creek (Maryland)
- Laurel Run (Maryland)
- New Creek (West Virginia)
- Limestone Run (West Virginia)
- Warrior Run (Maryland)
- Wills Creek (Pennsylvania/Maryland)
- Brush Creek (Pennsylvania)
- Little Wills Creek (Pennsylvania)
- Evitts Creek (Maryland and Pennsylvania)
- Patterson Creek (West Virginia)
- Mill Creek (West Virginia)
- Dans Run (West Virginia)
- Green Spring Run (West Virginia)
Read more about this topic: Potomac River
Famous quotes containing the words north, branch, potomac and/or river:
“Ah, how shall you know the dreary sorrow at the North Gate,
With Li Pos name forgotten,
And we guardsmen fed to the tigers.”
—Li Po (701762)
“She saw a dust bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister calxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
—Zora Neale Hurston (18911960)
“While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue, I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (18221893)
“If a walker is indeed an individualist there is nowhere he cant go at dawn and not many places he cant go at noon. But just as it demeans life to live alongside a great river you can no longer swim in or drink from, to be crowded into safer areas and hours takes much of the gloss off walkingone sport you shouldnt have to reserve a time and a court for.”
—Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)