Pickett's Run was not shown on Bluffton's original 1839 plat map, and the only known early map of Bluffton depicting a stream appeared in an 1876 historical atlas of Indiana. This natural waterway became an open sewer, and by the late 1800s it was known locally as an eyesore. In the summer of 1891, a City Council tour found the stream in horrid condition because property owners had drained and thrown filth into it, including from hog pens built over the stream, and the Street Commissioner was ordered to clean it as typhoid fever spread along the Run. In August 1891, the council voted 4-3 to create sanitary and storm sewerage systems to replace Pickett's Run, and in June 1894 voted 4-3 to build them, with Mayor Martin W. Walbert casting the deciding vote both times. By spring 1897, the sewer systems had been substantially finished and Pickett's Run had been filled in, and by 1898 it was described as obliterated, with sewers passing by each lot in the more densely populated part of the city. Townsfolk built houses on the buried stream, but in March 1913 a 100-year flood on the Wabash River sought out its buried tributary. Ninety years later, a flash flood before midnight on July 4, 2003, followed by a week-long flood, resurrected all of Pickett's Run and reclaimed the lower end of this forgotten tributary of the Wabash River. By early 2005, most houses built in the lower end of Pickett's Run had been bought by the city and torn down, and the area was maintained as green space reflecting the stream's role in shaping Bluffton and as part of the Wabash River floodplain.