The St. Marys: the Sturgeon River, out of Ohio

THE SOUTHERN RIVER

The muddy one, and proud of its fish: The Miami called this river Nameewa siipiiwi — Sturgeon River (an older form, mameewa siipiiwi, glosses the same); the Shawnee name is recorded as Kokothikithiipi. The sturgeon in the name was no ornament: the fish ran these waters, and the name is a record of what the river carried before it carried anything else. The St. Marys forms in southern Auglaize County, Ohio, where its East and Center branches meet, flows briefly west past the town of St. Marys — passing within two miles of Grand Lake St. Marys — then turns north and west-northwest through Rockford and Willshire, crosses into Adams County, Indiana, passes Decatur, and enters Fort Wayne from the southeast. In its last half mile it hooks around to meet the St. Joseph from the west and form the Maumee in the middle of downtown. The standard measure is 99 miles.

The St. Marys drains the flat clay floor of glacial Lake Maumee, and it carries that floor with it: it is a slow, sediment-heavy river, brown where the St. Joseph is green. Its Indiana watershed, with the upper Maumee's, covers about 376 square miles of Adams and Allen counties alone. The federal Board on Geographic Names writes it without an apostrophe — St. Marys, not St. Mary's — however often the city's own signs and papers have added one. It is along this river, at Foster Park and in the southwest neighborhoods, that Fort Wayne keeps its oldest continuous riverfront parkland.

Sources:

1. U.S. Geological Survey / GNIS — the 99-mile length, the Auglaize County formation, the course through Decatur, and the final hook into the confluence.
2. Indiana Department of Environmental Management, St. Marys River / Maumee River TMDL watershed description — the roughly 376-square-mile Indiana drainage and its tributary ditches.
3. Miami-Illinois and Shawnee names as carried in the river's reference record (Nameewa siipiiwi, "Sturgeon River"; Kokothikithiipi); McCafferty (2023) for the older mameewa siipiiwi 'Sturgeon River' and its place as the older name of the St. Marys–Maumee waterway.
4. U.S. Board on Geographic Names, on the unapostrophized spelling, as compiled by the Allen County Genealogical Society's St. Marys River page.