Clear Creek (Atlanta)

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Clear Creek is a stream in northeast Atlanta that is a tributary to Peachtree Creek and part of the Chattahoochee River watershed. It has two main branches, one originating east of the high ground along which Boulevard runs and another to the west originating on the northeast side of downtown Atlanta. The easterly branch of Clear Creek begins in several springs and branches in what is now Inman Park and the Old Fourth Ward. Flowing north, the creek was joined by other branches and springs, including Angier Springs near the end of Belgrade Avenue and the so-called Ponce de Leon Springs, which were “discovered” during railroad construction in the 1860s and gave rise to the eponymous park and avenue.

The western branch of Clear Creek began in the northeast quadrant of downtown between Decatur and Peachtree Streets and flowed through the lowlands east of Piedmont Avenue where the Atlanta Civic Center was built in the mid-1960s. In the fall of 1864 the Union Army camped along the creek, and for several decades that prong of Clear Creek was known as Shermantown Branch. Flowing in a northeasterly meander through the eastern side of the Midtown neighborhood, it joined the eastern prong of the creek in the vicinity of the present Midtown High School stadium.^[1]

From there the creek flowed in a northerly direction and is joined by several smaller tributaries, including one which originated in at least two springs, one in the vicinity of the Federal Reserve and another northeast of the intersection of Eighth and Juniper Streets. Their water combined to form a branch that was large enough to be dammed in 1894 to create Piedmont Park's Clara Meer. Today there are six springs in the restored wetlands below the dam. A somewhat larger branch drains Orme Park and a large part of the northwest side of Virginia-Highland as well as the southwest side of Morningside. Sometimes known as Stillhouse Branch in the nineteenth century, it joins Clear Creek a few hundred feet west of the dead end of Dutch Valley Road. A smaller branch drains most of Ansley Park, emptying into Clear Creek in the Ansley Golf Club's course east of Montgomery Ferry Road, and yet another branch out of Sherwood Forest flows into Clear Creek just east of the Interstate 85 bridge.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a grist mill was located just downstream from where the Beltline crosses the creek at the northern end of Piedmont Park. As Jones Mill, it was a landmark in maps from the Civil War, but it is often known as Walkers Mill, for a later owner.

For decades in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the creek was used as a sewer and polluted by industrial waste. The western branch was completely buried by the 1930s and much of the eastern branch by 1950. North of Tenth Street, the creek was turned into a large concrete channel through Piedmont Park and through the Ansley golf course.