Big Timber Creek

Big Timber Creek
River
Main stem, looking upstream (2007)
Name origin: Dutch, Timmer Kill
Country	United States
State	New Jersey
Source	Big Lebanon Branch
- location	Cross Keys, New Jersey,
- elevation	158 ft (48 m)
- coordinates	39°43′38″N 75°01′28″W / 39.72722°N 75.02444°W / 39.72722; -75.02444
Mouth
- location	Westville, New Jersey,
- elevation	0 ft (0 m)
- coordinates	39°53′05″N 75°07′59″W / 39.88472°N 75.13306°W / 39.88472; -75.13306Coordinates: 39°53′05″N 75°07′59″W / 39.88472°N 75.13306°W / 39.88472; -75.13306
Length	5.6 mi (9 km)
Basin	63 sq mi (163 km2)

Big Timber Creek is a 5.6-mile-long (9.0 km) stream in southwestern New Jersey, United States, and is also known by the name 'Tetamekanchz Kyl' by the Lenape tribes. It drains a watershed of 63 square miles (160 km²). A tributary of the Delaware River, it enters the Delaware between the boroughs of Brooklawn and Westville, just south Gloucester City and across from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The main stream and South Branch form about half of the border between Camden and Gloucester counties.

Pre-Columbian Big Timber Creek was home to numerous villages of the Lenni Lenape. In colonial times, the creek was a commercial waterway, and it powered a multitude of mills up through the 1950s. In the second half of the 20th century it suffered the ill effects of the rapid post–World War II development that plagued many of America's waterways. As of 2007, it had recovered somewhat, thanks to pollution controls and improvements in sewage treatment.

The creek was named Tetamekanchz by the local Lenape tribe, with the North Branch named Tetamekanchz, the Chews Landing section named Arwames, Beaver Branch called Tekoke, and Little Timber Creek named Sassackon. The earliest recorded use of the current name is by an early Dutch explorer, David P. DeVries, who refers to a Timmer Kill, "Timber Creek" in Dutch, in his memoirs of his journey of 1630–1633, after the construction of Fort Nassau at its mouth. This name became anglicized when the Quakers arrived. In 1697, the West Jersey Proprietors, in creating the town of Gloucester, decreed that the name be the "Gloucester River", and although that name did appear in documents for several years, it faded away. A much smaller creek lying to the north, Little Timber Creek, finds the Delaware at the same place as its larger namesake. To differentiate between the two, the latter came to be known as "Great Timber Creek", which soon became "Big Timber Creek". Even so, at the end of the 20th century it was still usually referred to in speech as simply "Timber Creek".