Prettyboy Reservoir
body of water
Prettyboy Reservoir is a 1,500-acre (610 ha) reservoir in the Hereford Zone of northern Baltimore County, Maryland. While the reservoir is in Baltimore County, the independent city of Baltimore owns the reservoir and the surrounding land. The reservoir is one of three reservoirs created to supply the municipal water system for Baltimore City, Baltimore County, and northern Anne Arundel County constructed by the Baltimore City Department of Public Works. Prettyboy Reservoir, along with Loch Raven Reservoir further down the Big Gunpowder Falls, provide about 61% of the drinking water for the Baltimore metropolitan area system; for this reason, the Prettyboy is considered a "source water" or drinking water watershed. The reservoir contains about 19 billion US gallons (72,000,000 m3) of water on average.
The water from Prettyboy Reservoir is transferred to Loch Raven via Gunpowder Falls rather than directly to Baltimore. It is then transferred via tunnel from Loch Raven to the Montebello Filtration Plants in Baltimore for treatment and distribution. Prettyboy Dam, completed in 1932, impounds the Gunpowder Falls to create the Reservoir. The dam has a spillway crest elevation of 520 ft (160 m) above mean sea level and covers about 1,500 acres (6.1 km2).
According to tradition, the reservoir was named after a settler's horse, Pretty Boy, who drowned in a nearby creek.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7242310. Authority coordinates are 39.643, -76.741. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1932.
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This entry incorporates text from “Prettyboy Reservoir” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.