Town Creek, also known as Old Town Creek and as the West Fork of the Tombigbee River, passes under the Natchez Trace Parkway at about milepost 264.3 on the north side of Tupelo. The U.S. Geological Survey's station Town Creek at Natchez Trace near Tupelo sits at the crossing, where the creek drains 109 square miles. It is a stream of extremes: a 1950 state report on surface waters recorded 12,600 cubic feet per second at the Oldtown Creek gauge at Tupelo on March 28, 1944, and a flow of 0.2 cubic feet per second there that July. That gauge, on U.S. Highway 78 a mile east of Tupelo, drained 114 square miles.
The same report estimated that its flow fell to 1 cubic foot per second or less a tenth of the time and exceeded 205 cubic feet per second another tenth. The basin grows quickly downstream: 216 square miles above Kings Creek, 233 at Eason Boulevard and 271 near Verona. As the West Fork Tombigbee near Nettleton, draining 617 square miles, it carried 56,300 cubic feet per second on February 14, 1948.
The valley floor is clay, silt and sand, which the 2019 Office of Geology map of the Tupelo quadrangle puts at about 25 feet thick along the larger streams. The creek joins the Tombigbee River about two miles east of Amory.
Getting there
34.3079, -88.7208
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