Allegheny River

Variant name of place

Allegany; Allegany Ohio

Geographic position

41.8667° N, 77.9164° W

Sources

Williams, Charles, E. Along the Allegheny River: The Northern Watershed. Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006. Web. http://www.theallegheny.com/theallegheny.html.

General note

The Allegheny Ohio is region in lower western New York State and western Pennsylvania named for the Allegheny River that runs through it. The Allegheny River is about 320 miles in length, with its origin in the springs of northern Pennsylvania. From these springs, the Allegheny travels into northern New York before it moves into southwestern Pennsylvania where it meets the Monongahela River in present-day Pittsburg, at which point the two rivers feed into the Ohio River. By the 18th century, the Delaware Indians, or Lenni Lenape Tribe, had been driven from their ancestral lands along the Delaware River west to the Allegany river valley, which they called Alligewinenk, "a land into which they came from distant parts." (The Haudenosaunee called the river Ohio, a variant name.) The Lenni Lenapes displaced the Haudenosaunees in western Pennsylvania, and the basin of the Allegheny River served as hunting grounds and homeland for the Senecas, Delawares, and Shawnee Indians.