Antietam

Antietam Creek flows through the Hagerstown Valley of southern Pennsylvania and western Maryland. Its eastern and western branches join in Pennsylvania, and the creek winds south to the Potomac River below Sharpsburg. Its name is thought to derive from an Algonquian word for a swift-flowing stream. Indigenous communities fished the creek and grew maize on its bottomlands, and the valley formed a route through the forest between the Susquehanna and Potomac country. Colonists settled the farmland after 1700, and traders moved along the valley in the eighteenth century.