Nuttallburg was built around Short Creek, a stream that played a major role in residents' lives by providing water for the community and its industry while also dividing the town socially. Founder John Nuttall channeled water from Short Creek to cool his coke ovens and diverted some into town for residents, and John Nuttall II recalled that his grandfather built a flume along the upper edge of the village to the coke oven reservoir, with branch flumes carrying water to central parts of town. Short Creek also separated black residents from white residents, with African-Americans living east of the creek and white residents living west of it. Rebuilding the Short Creek bridge, which dated to the 1890s, was one of the first tasks in opening Nuttallburg to the public in 2005 and showed the effort required to reopen the remote site.