The Maumee: the river that is born here

FORT WAYNE TO LAKE ERIE · 137 MILES

A great river that starts at a street corner: The Maumee is one of the few important American rivers that begins inside a city. The Miami called it Taawaawa siipiiwi — River of the Odawa, the Ottawa people who lived toward its mouth. As early as 1671 the French were calling it the Miami du Lac, the Miami of the Lake, and in United States treaties it appears simply as "the Miami." The modern name is the Odawa word for the Miami themselves — Maamii — filtered through French spelling: the river named, in the end, for the people of its headwaters, by the people of its mouth. From the confluence it runs 137 miles northeast, gathering the Tiffin at Defiance, the Auglaize — its largest tributary — below Defiance, and the Blanchard, then spreading into Maumee Bay at Toledo.

By drainage it is the largest river flowing into the Great Lakes. How largest is a genuine quarrel of the sources, and it is printed here as one: the basin is given as 6,354 square miles in the commonly cited federal figure, as "more than 4.2 million acres" (about 6,560 square miles) by the Army Corps of Engineers, as 6,608 square miles in the scholarly watershed literature, and as 8,316 square miles in the Great Lakes Commission and EPA-area-of-concern literature. On any of the counts the Maumee drains all or part of some two dozen counties in three states, two-thirds of it farmland, and it delivers to Lake Erie roughly half of all the sediment the lake receives from its tributaries and, by the EPA's figures, nearly half the phosphorus — while contributing only a few percent of the lake's water. Ohio designated the Maumee a state scenic river on July 18, 1974. That a river can be at once a scenic river, a working port's approach, and the single largest pollution load in the Great Lakes system is the whole of its modern story, told in the entries below.

Sources:

1. U.S. Geological Survey and the river's reference record — the 137-mile course, the tributaries at Defiance, the 1974 Ohio scenic-river designation, and the French and treaty names (Miami du Lac, "the Miami").
2. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Western Lake Erie Basin study — the "more than 4.2 million acres" basin and the Maumee as the largest tributary discharging into Lake Erie.
3. Great Lakes Commission, Great Lakes Rivermouths: A Primer (2013), and Lake Erie Waterkeeper — the 8,316-square-mile figure, the roughly 50 percent share of tributary discharge and sediment, and the 40-plus percent share of phosphorus.
4. Michael McCafferty (2023) and the Myaamia record — Taawaawa siipiiwi 'Ottawa River,' and "Maumee" from Odawa maami 'Miami.'