The size of the brook trout you caught strongly indicates that they were natives. The PFBC only stocks legal size and larger trout. Most are 9 inches or above.
Old time literature describes how brook trout would live in the big freestones, like Kettle Creek, until it started to get too warm in the late spring or early summer. Then they would move upstream into cooler tributaries and headwaters for the summer. After spawning in the fall (mid-October) they would move back downstream and winter over in the big pools of the mainstem waters. This life history gave brook trout that moved into the bigger waters access to larger and more abundant prey species. In this way brook trout of the big freestone waters could get much larger than those that spent their whole lives in small, infertile headwaters. Foot-long brookies were not uncommon and they sometimes achieved 20 inches. Now these big freestone waters are managed as put-and-take fisheries. They are heavily stocked and plundered every spring which has eliminated this phase of the brook trout's life history.
I have caught sub-legal brookies in Kettle Creek as far down as the swimming pool at Ole Bull Park in the middle of June. But these attempts to revive the past are mostly in vain. Nobody wants to wait the few more years it would take for them to grow larger. Nowadays we want to put our trout in one day and catch them the next.
