Youghiogheny

(Pronounced ‘Yockagaynee’ and popularly called ‘the Yok’) river flowing through West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, USA; length 217 km/135 mi. It rises in West Virginia, flows along the West Virginia–Maryland border into Pennsylvania, and joins the Monongahela River at McKeesport, southeast of Pittsburgh.

Course From its source on the west side of Backbone Mountain, it flows northeast along the border and into Pennsylvania, through Youghiogheny River Lake, a reservoir formed by a 1944 dam near Confluence, Pennsylvania, where the Casselman River joins it from the northeast. The river continues northwest, through Laurel Hill and Chestnut Ridge, to the Monongahela.

History The Youghiogheny, whose Algonquian name signifies ‘contrary’, flows away from the sea, into the Mississippi River system; rising near the Potomac's headwaters, it provided a short early route from the Atlantic coast into the interior. In the 1870s the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was built through its valley, in which Connellsville, Pennsylvania, became a major provider of coal.