The East Branch of the Delaware and its tributaries, including the Binnekill, Bush Kill, Plattekill, Mill Brook, Dry Brook, Bull Run, Batavia Kill, and Red Kill, have been central to the history of Margaretville and the wider Town of Middletown. Rising in the surrounding mountains, these streams carved the hollows and narrow valleys where Native Americans first traveled. The Munsee tribe of the Lenni Lenape, known to Europeans as the Delaware Indians, ranged out from forty settlements along the Hudson and Delaware Rivers on seasonal hunting and fishing expeditions, but pressure from neighboring Iroquois and then white settlers pushed them from the region by 1730. The first permanent white settlers found evidence of a seasonal Indian settlement near Arkville, where the East Branch meets the Bush Kill; both the settlement and the two thousand three hundred-foot mountain beside it were called Pakatakan. Several Dutch families from the Hudson Valley arrived in 1763, and many local waterway names preserved the Dutch word kill for stream. Settlers used the river and streams for food, transportation, and water power for grist mills, sawmills, textile mills, cooperages, and tanneries. The East Branch carried Catskill timber to markets in Philadelphia and Trenton, created fertile bottom land for agriculture, attracted artists, tourists, and vacation home owners, and, after the Pepacton Reservoir was built in the 1950s, supplied clean water to millions in New York City and its suburbs as the largest reservoir in the city's water system, providing up to twenty-five percent of the water for nine million people. The East Branch also became the nucleus of Margaretville, which grew along its banks, but it repeatedly brought destructive floods. In 1996, Margaretville suffered its greatest recorded flood. At the height of the January 19, 1996 flood, twenty-seven thousand one hundred cubic feet of water per second passed the U.S.G.S. gauging station at the Fair Street Bridge, surpassing the previous record of twenty thousand six hundred cubic feet per second set in the 1950 flood. After a series of January snowstorms left more than four feet of snow across much of the Catskills, unseasonably warm air on January 18 and 19 rapidly melted the snowpack, and three to five inches of rain falling on frozen ground sent runoff into the East Branch. The river crested at 14.9 feet, more than a foot above the 1950 crest, and this hundred-year flood swept vehicles, trees, and buildings downstream. In the Margaretville area it destroyed or damaged fifty houses and mobile homes and forty businesses, virtually wiped out twelve businesses on Bridge Street, caused three hundred thousand dollars in damage to Margaretville Central School District, seriously damaged the Catholic Church, the Post Office, and the American Legion Hall, and brought a ten-day State of Emergency in Delaware County. Dozens of people turned to the Red Cross for shelter, food, and assistance, while Governor George Pataki, Federal Emergency Management Agency head James Lee Witt, the National Guard, the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, and volunteers from across the Northeast aided the community.