The D River (no, not "The Driver") in Lincoln City, Oregon, flows under the famed coastal highway U.S. 101, connecting Devil's Lake, the town’s shallow recreational lake, with the Pacific Ocean. Along its mighty banks, the sights include a motel, a beach parking lot, a popular local seafood restaurant, and—well, that’s about it. D River, you see, is only a few hundred feet long. But does that make it the world’s shortest river? Well, thereby hangs a tale.

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D River got its appropriately succinct moniker in 1940, when the town’s chamber of commerce held a contest to name the outlet, which had previously been known as Devil's Creek and Delake Creek. The same year, say residents, the U.S. Geodetic-Geographic verified the town’s claim that the 440-foot channel was the shortest river in the world. A sign placed on the highway to that effect became a popular tourist spot, and the Guinness Book of World Records listed the “achievement.” All seemed well.

In 1987, however, the trouble started. Mrs. Susie Nardlinger’s fifth-grade class in Great Falls, Montana, decided that they’d been cheated: An unnamed stream in their area that connected Giant Springs to the Missouri River was far shorter, only 201 feet long. The kids petitioned the U.S. Board on Geographical Names to dub the stream “the Roe River,” and then submitted it to Guinness. It worked. In the 1987 edition of the record book, D was out and Roe was in.

This ignited a squabble that lasted decades. Lincoln City’s chamber of commerce groused that the manmade Roe was just a “drainage ditch surveyed for a school project.” In return, Mrs. Nardlinger sniffed to reporters that the D was just an “ocean water backup.” Dallas Neil, a Montana football star and future NFLer, was even dispatched to The Tonight Show to plead his river’s case.

Lincoln City eventually re-surveyed the D and announced that its 440-foot length was a low-tide measurement, and that at high tide, the river was only 120 feet—the rest was officially an estuary. Nardlinger replied that the Roe has a shorter fork that’s about 30 feet and called for a new survey. As friends will do when couples squabble, Guinness politely bowed out of the “Shortest River” category for good. Maybe it’s time for a “Stupidest Chamber of Commerce War” category instead?

Photograph by Paul Noll

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