Spa Creek was once known as Carroll's Creek, in reference to Charles Carroll, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who lived along the creek. The creek was also known as Todd's Creek and Acton's Creek, named after Thomas Todd and Richard Acton, respectively, who were amongst the first settlers in Annapolis. In 1904, the United States Board on Geographic Names made the name Spa Creek official for usage in federal publications. The current name purportedly originates “from the fact that an old pork barrel was placed in a spring on Primrose farm, and the deluded public, tasting the essence of the meat, concluded that the spring had medicinal qualities in it, and called the fountain Spa Spring. Hence, the name of the creek.” ('Maryland - The Pioneer of Religious Liberty: The Only Catholic Colony of the Thirteen and the First to Establish Civil and Religious Freedom' By Elihu Samuel Riley, 1917)
You read that right. Annapolis' premier creek is named in honor of BACON.
Shut Your Mouth
Land reclamation, also known as land fill (not to be confused with a landfill), is the process of creating new land from ocean, riverbeds, or lake beds. (Wikipedia)
The mouth of Spa Creek used to look very different two centuries ago. Through the efforts of the Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft, the Naval School was established at a 10-acre Army post named Fort Severn in Annapolis, Maryland, on October 10, 1845, with a class of 50 midshipmen and seven professors. In 1850 the Naval School became the United States Naval Academy. As the U.S. Navy grew over the years, the Academy expanded and the campus of 10 acres increased to 338. The original student body of 50 midshipmen grew to a brigade size of 4,000.
The campus is landlocked by the City of Annapolis to the west, the Severn River to the East and Spa Creek to the South. In addition to several adjacent land purchases, the campus size increased through a series of land fills beginning in 1898, adding 67 acres. The most recent land fill, completed in 1959, claimed an additional 56 acres for athletic fields and new buildings. Two and a half million cubic yards of fill were dredged from the Severn River, allowing the boundary of the Academy grounds to extend up to 200 yards into the river. Directly across the creek from GZ is where the extended shoreline begins encroaching into the mouth of Spa Creek and out towards the river.
This is a severe example of land reclamation, but there are countless smaller examples throughout Spa Creek where the shoreline has been altered. Tidal wetlands, emergent and sub-aquatic shoreline vegetation, which serve a critical role in filtering runoff from surrounding land, have largely been supplanted with stone revetments and bulkheads. While these shoreline hardening techniques may help mitigate short-term property loss, it is often at the demise of the tidal interface which provides the shallow water depths and saturated soils required by these filters to function and thrive.
Sources:
http://www.usna.edu/USNAHistory/
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1499&dat=19561012&id=w1caAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SiUEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6572,939661&hl=en
Please be careful not to drop the cache on your foot when retrieving it. This was my solution to prevent it from floating away.
Congrats to usnacacher on FTF