USA > Iowa > Chickasaw County > History of Chickasaw and Howard counties, Iowa, Volume I > Part 3
USA > Iowa > Howard County > History of Chickasaw and Howard counties, Iowa, Volume I > Part 3
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43
Feet
7. Black loam mixed with weathered fragments of limestone .. 2
6. Thin-bedded, earthy limestone, badly weathered, becom- ing thicker toward the west end of the quarry .... 3
5. Band of harder, purer, drab-colored, crystalline limestone which is not affected by weathering. 3/3
4. Thin-bedded zone which disintegrates into a light yellow, marly clay mixed with concretionary nodules. 2
3. Thin, laminated, argillaceous beds, yellow in color, contain- ing some fine siliceous grit.
1
2. Harder, dark gray beds which now form the floor of the quarry, layers six to ten inches in thickness, dipping southwest, upper surface irregular and uneven. 2
I. Heavy, hard beds, not now exposed, but were formerly quar- ried over a small area. 3
30
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
A few rods to the southwest is the second opening, which includes the same beds as the quarry just described, and shows in addition some fine beds of good quality above No. 6 of the preceding section. A mile and a half north of the Brown quarry, near the middle of the south line of section 27, township 97 north, range 14 west, on land of John W. Kane, there is a quarry which shows a series of beds probably equivalent to those above No. 6 in the second opening on the land of Mr. Brown. Some of the layers are hard, bluish in color, and from 21/2 to 3 inches in thickness. In general the beds are thin, but toward the bot- tom of the exposed section there are some four-inch courses which may be made to serve a good purpose for such masonry as the neighborhood requires. Two miles farther north, near the middle of the north line of section 22 of the same range and township, the Tierney quarry is opened in a knob-like, stony point. The stone is the same as at the Kane quarry. Very little work has been done here in recent years.
To the same horizon as the exposures in Deerfield Township should probably be referred the two quarries which have been opened in section 4. Chickasaw Township. One of these is in the northeast and the other in the northwest quarter of the section. The greatest amount of work has been done in the northeast quarry. As usual at this horizon, in this part of the state, the beds are thin. They are quite magnesian, but not truly dolomitic. Toward the bottom the layers are thicker and stone of fair quality may be obtained. The strata are here cut by two systems of joints trending nearly east-west and north-south. As in all the magnesian beds of the region, there are some cavities lined with calcite.
The exposures so far discussed under the head of Intermediate Beds, are all on high ground as compared with those in the river valley at Chickasaw and farther south, but at an altitude from thirty to forty feet above the level of the river, in the southeast quarter of section 20, Bradford Township, there are two openings belonging to the Intermediate Beds. These probably lie a little below the floor of the Brown and Kane quarries in Deerfield Township. The beds are thin in the upper part of the exposure, but there are some heavier ledges near the base. All the layers are more or less magnesian. Formerly these quarries were regularly worked, and some of the firmer and purer beds were burned into lime, but no work has been done here in recent years. What is known as the Allen, quarry, 234 miles northwest of Nashua, in Floyd County, is operated in these same beds, and from this the following detailed section is obtained :
Feet
6. Thin-bedded limestone, the courses varying from one to five inches in thickness, some layers soft and granular, others hard and fine-grained . 8
5. Some firmer courses, six inches in thickness 21/2
4. An eight-inch ledge of good building stone. 2/3
3. A firm fourteen-inch ledge 116
2. A twelve-inch ledge I
1. Heavy stone suitable for bridge work. 11/2
.
31
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
The order of succession is partly obscured by waste and weathering in the quarries in section 20 east of Nashua, but so far as it could be determined it is identical with that in the Allen quarry. There are few recognizable fossils at either of these points, the only forms seen were casts of Atrypa reticularis in the lower heavy ledges. Stone of the fine-grained, lithographic type crops out in the road about half way between Nashua and the Allen quarry.
The Upper, Yellow, Magnesian Beds. In the northwest corner of the town plat of Nashua there are heavy, dolomitic layers above the level of the litho- graphic stone seen in the road a short distance to the northwest. This is evi- dently the equivalent of the thick, magnesian layers in the upper part of the Salisbury quarry and the other quarries about Vernon Springs and Cresco, described in the report on Howard County, the equivalent also of the yellow magnesian beds quarried in the river bluffs near Littleton in Buchanan County, and of the beds quarried near Raymond in Blackhawk.
These beds are not well developed in the western part of Chickasaw, but they are seen to fairly good advantage on the other side of the county. The best and practically the only section in this region occurs in the west bluff of the Little Cedar River, near the center of section 25 in the southern part of Utica Township. There is here a section ranging from fifteen to twenty feet in thickness. The rock is checked by numerous joints, the thickness of the beds varies from six or eight to twenty inches, or even more. The rock is soft, yellow, magnesian, but durable and capable of affording a fair quality of ashlar and dimension stone. It has the concretionary or concentric iron staining of the corresponding beds in eastern Howard County, and there are the same vug-like cavities with calcite lining. Some impressions of coarse-ribbed Atrypas occur in some of the beds near the top of the section. At the bridge a short distance west of Little Turkey Postoffice the same beds are exposed, and there are other exposures one-fourth of a mile above the bridge. Only one exposure was noted on Crane Creek, and that was in the northwest quarter of the north- west quarter of section 13, Jacksonville Township. Weathered fragments of a soft, magnesian limestone were all that could be seen. It is probable, how- ever, that the horizon is the same as that of the beds on the Little Turkey in Utica Township.
GENERAL DEVONIAN SECTION
The probable thickness of the several members of the Devonian section in Chickasaw County may be expressed as follows :
7. Upper magnesian beds. Feet
6. Lithographic beds 50
5. Intermediate beds 10
25
4. Idiostroma beds 5
3. Parryanus beds, and down to next division. 25
2. Acervularia beds 5
I. Gypidula, and Atrypa beds, up to Acervularia zone 45
32
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
PLEISTOCENE SYSTEM
KANSAN STAGE 1
Kansan Drift. There is reason to believe that the Kansan drift underlies the whole of Chickasaw County. It has been almost completely covered by the later drift of the Iowan stage, but in the rain-cut gullies by the roadsides it is revealed at many widely separated localities. It is shown in scores of well sections, and the new work on the Great Western Railway has led to the making of many cuts in which the Kansan appears. The new railway cuts southeast of New Hampton all show the relation of the blue Kansan till to the overlying yellow Iowan. In one of the cuts about two miles from New Hampton the stratified sands and gravels of the Buchanan substage lie between the Iowan and the Kansan. In some places the yellow Iowan till rests on undisturbed rusty gravels, and the line of separation is sharply defined; in other places the gravel has been worked up into the Iowan, in which case it is not easy to recognize the exact limits of the two formations. In general the unweathered Kansan is blue in color. It is also quite calcareous. There are many limestone pebbles embedded in the till, but greenstone fragments are more common. There are places, however, in the fresh railway cuts where the Kansan is almost black, owing to the presence of a large amount of organic matter. Splintered frag- ments of branches and trunks of trees are conspicuous in most fresh sections, the remains of forests that occupied the state during the Aftonian interglacial interval, and were overwhelmed, broken, rolled, crushed and worked up into the subglacial till by the advancing glaciers of the Kansan stage. The exposed surface of the Kansan was weathered, leached, oxidized and reddened during the intervals between the withdrawal of the Kansan ice and the advent of the Iowan. The roadside cuts show a number of places where the material of this leached and reddened ferretto zone has been worked into the Iowan till in such . a way as to make the drawing of a sharp line of division impossible. The fresh, unmixed Iowan is quite calcareous, the Kansan ferretto is completely leached. the mixture of ferretto and Iowan responds feebly to the acid test.
While the Kansan drift was exposed to meteorologic agencies in the intervals between the close of the Kansan stage and the beginning of the Iowan, the surface was at times washed and beaten by rains and at other times was affected by winds in such a way as to remove quite an amount of the fine surface clay, leaving the contained pebbles and cobble stones as a sheet of gravel of varying thickness, conforming to all the inequalities of the eroded surface. This fact is discussed in the reports on Page, Howard and Tama counties. West of Devon in Chickasaw County the Iowan drift is thin. The old surface of the Kansan was not greatly disturbed by the action of the Iowan glaciers. The weathered ferretto zone of the older drift and the more or less perfect sheet of residual or concentrated gravels which covered the old pre-Iowan surface, are shown in the roadway, or in the deeper trenches by the side of the road, between Devon and North Washington.
Buchanan Gravels. The great sheets and trains of gravel which were de- posited as outwash at the time the Kansan ice was melting and gradually with- drawing from this part of Iowa, are very generally distributed. Like the surface
33
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
of the exposed till, these deposits suffered from the effects of weathering during the very long intervals preceding the coming of the Iowan glaciers and the dis- tribution of the Iowan till. The gravels are red and rusty, and all feldspar-bearing fragments of the transported rocks are rotted, decayed, disintegrated. As in Howard, Buchanan and other counties in Northeastern Iowa, there are here two phases of the gravels, the upland phase and the valley phase. In the upland phase, which occurs on the higher areas, the beds are quite heterogeneous in that they are composed of fine sand, pebbles, cobbles, and small bowlders ranging up to a foot in diameter. The valley phase is made up mostly of small polished quartz pebbles, with little or no sand, and without the larger cobbles and bowlders. The mode of origin and deposition of the two types of gravel deposits is discussed in the report on Howard County.
A number of deposits of very typical, ferruginous, upland gravels occur in and around New Hampton. The foundation for the extension of the German Catholic Church was excavated in such gravels. A very characteristic bed is seen at the creamery, one-fourth of a mile south of the Great Western Railway station. The gravels are very deeply stained with iron rust, the iron constituents being completely oxidized. Some parts of the beds are wholly or partially cemented into a conglomerate by the redeposition of the ferric oxide, and there are many hollow clay iron-stones, the result of secondary concretionary processes. There are the usual decayed granites and other feldspathic rocks ready to crumble to minute fragments when removed from their surroundings, and there are also some hard, undecayed cobblestones which retain the glacial striæ. The bed was cut through in grading for the railway, and a section ten feet in thickness is exposed. Less than one-half mile farther south the railway has cut through another and more extensive bed of the same oxidized gravels in which are found all the characteristics of the upland phase. At this point the deposit forms an esker-like ridge, and east of the railroad there is a very large pit from which material has been taken and used in the improvement of the adjacent streets and roads. It is almost universally the case throughout northeastern Iowa that the lower part of deposits of upland gravel is made up of cross-bedded sands, while the coarser materials-the pebbles, cobbles and bowlders-are found only in the upper part of the section. This feature is very strikingly illustrated in the pit last mentioned. There is another large gravel pit at New Hampton two or three hundred yards west of the railway and south of the creamery. There is not the usual amount of coarse material in the upper part of this exposure ; erosion may have carried it away ; the excessive staining of the sand in the pit would indicate that such material had once been present in its ordinary position, for pure quartz sand could not furnish anything which, by oxidation, would give rise to ferruginous stains. At this point there is no Iowan drift overlying the deposit.
Two miles southeast of New Hampton there are some new cuts which show a comparatively thin sheet of Buchanan gravels lying between beds of blue Kansan and yellow Iowan drift. At one point the Iowan till arches over a low, narrow ridge of the gravels. Farther on, the Buchanan deposit becomes thicker, and the bottom of the cut, occupied by the sandy phase of the formation, is above the surface of the Kansan drift.
It is not necessary, nor would it be profitable, to mention all the observed Vol. I-3
34
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
exposures of the upland gravels. From descriptions already given anyone interested will be able to recognize these beds at sight. For the purpose merely of indicating their general distribution, reference may be made to a typical section in a road cut, on the west side of the southwest quarter of the southwest quarter of section 3. Fredericksburg Township, and to another near the opposite corner of the county, in the southeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section 21, in the northern part of Deerfield Township, within less than a mile of the Howard County line. Another excellent example occurs in a cut made for the wagon road through a high ridge near the southeast corner of the northeast quarter of section 9, Chickasaw Township. This is probably the thickest deposit of the gravels found in the county. Near the bottom of the hill there are a number of small springs and seeps, presumably at the line of contact of the gravels with the underlying Kansan clay. On the upland, one-half mile east of Chick- asaw. there is a pit deserving notice for the reason that from it has been taken the material for making one of the best pieces of road in the county, that between Ionia and Chickasaw. An exposure of the upland type of gravels is seen in an unusual position at the north end of Brasher Street in the City of Nashua. The bed occurs only a few feet above the level of the Cedar River, and yet it shows one of the characteristics of the valley phase of these deposits.
The valley gravels are so universally distributed along all streams that it seems scarcely necessary to do more in discussing their distribution than simply to mention the fact. There are extensive deposits about Lawler. Farther up Crane Creek the valley gravels take the form of fairly well defined terraces, as near Jerico in Jacksonville Township. Along the Little Cedar from above Bassett to Bradford there is an almost continuous sheet of gravel covering the bottom of the valley. The broad bottom lands through which the converging branches of the Wapsipinicon flow in Dayton Township, are underlain with gravel which affords perfect underdrainage to what would otherwise be wet and swampy land. It will be sufficient to say that every stream course of any consequence has its valley trains, and that no part of the county is far removed from an abundance of the best possible materials for the improvement of the country roads.
IOWAN STAGE
Iowan Drift. With the exception of some sandy hills along the Little Cedar River, west and southwest of Chickasaw, the Iowan drift is spread as a prac- tically continuous mantle over the entire county. In many places this mantle is very thin, and in no place is it known to attain a very great thickness. The yellow calcareous clay of the Iowan is readily distinguished from the blue clay of the fresh, unweathered Kansan, and it is not likely to be confused with the red or brown weathered and oxidized zone of the older till. For facts bearing on questions of the relative age of the two deposits, see the report on Howard County. The Towan drift is not so pebbly as the Kansan. Its transported rocks take the form of large bowlders, very much larger on an average than anything appear- ing in the Kansan. Furthermore, these bowlders are coarse granites of types altogether unknown in the older drift. Chickasaw County has been favored with an unusual number of these erratic masses of granite. It is doubtful whether any other county in Iowa is so well supplied. The value and amount of the high grade
35
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
building stone which the Iowan glaciers carried from the North and deposited in this county are well nigh incalculable. There is an unusual area, small in size, about a mile and a half south of Bassett, in the southeast quarter of section 17, Chickasaw Township, where the surface is sprinkled with bowlders a foot or two in diameter, in a way resembling some portions of New England or New York. But in general the rocks transported by the lowan ice were brought in large masses, ten, fifteen or twenty feet in diameter. While in the aggregate, therefore, the mass is very great, almost beyond computation, the individual bowlders are rarely so numerous as seriously to encumber the surface. The largest of the many large bowlders seen in the county is that known as Saint Peter, located in the southwest quarter of section 3, near the center of Washington Township. Saint Peter is fully twenty feet in height and more than eighty feet in circum- ference.
A large portion of the Iowan bowlders lie on or near the surface. This fact has led some prominent geologists to the hasty and untenable conclusion that they were transported on top of the ice as part of an accumulation of super- glacial drift. It must, however, be evident to any one who thinks seriously about the matter that a continental ice sheet, like the Iowan, would be, like the ice cap of Greenland, wholly free from superficial detritus. Valley glaciers, like those of the Alps, may become loaded with superficial material; and a piedmont glacier, like the Malaspina, made up of confluent mountain glaciers carrying medial moraines, might gather sufficient detritus on its surface to support a vigorously growing forest ; but the possibility of any considerable amount of super- ficial drift on a continental glacier is too small to be seriously considered. That the bowlders of the Iowan drift were not superglacial is abundantly attested by the fact that a very large proportion of them are planed and scored on one or more sides. Some of the very largest and most prominent of them have been broken up into blocks for building stone, and in every case the lower side has been found to be planed and worn by being dragged along underneath the ice. The Iowan bowlders are now on the surface for the reason, largely, that the Iowan glaciers carried a comparatively small amount of clay and other fine detrital material, and therefore the thickness of the Iowan drift sheet is not sufficient to conceal the great blocks of granite which were embedded in the lower surface of the ice.
Data bearing on the thickness of the Pleistocene deposits will be given below in connection with the discussion of wells and water supplies.
SOILS
The soil of our territory shows but little variety. Over most of the county the soil is a rich, deep, black loam developed on the Iowan drift. Some portions of the Iowan surface are not well drained and in certain seasons the soil is wet and heavy, but such areas are admirably adapted to the growth of some kinds of meadow grasses. There is very little of the county, however, that cannot be culti- vated successfully in years of normal rainfall. The warm, black, fertile loam developed on the Iowan till, and very much the same wherever this drift is spread. is one of the most desirable, the most productive, the most inexhaustible of the soil types found in our great state.
36
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD-COUNTIES
In the broad sags which serve throughout most of the county for river valleys, extensive sheets of the valley phase of Buchanan gravels are present as a subsoil and afford perfect underdrainage to large areas which would otherwise be too wet for cultivation. On the hills about Nashua the soil is thin, the Devonian limestones coming near the surface. There is a small area of sandy soil on the erosional hills west of the Little Cedar River, in sections 20 and 21, Chickasaw Township. On the whole there is no part of the state more favored in the matter of soils than Chickasaw County.
ECONOMIC PRODUCTS
Apart from the splendid soil of the county there are no geological deposits capable of supporting extensive industries. The quarries furnishing building stone have been individually described in the discussion of the Devonian. The most important quarries are those in Chickasaw and Bradford townships, for these are most favorably located with reference to markets; but probably the best grade of limestone occurring in the county is that seen near the center of section 25, in the southeast corner of Uinta Township. The old Bishop quarry might be made to yield a good quality of flagging stone. The immense amount of granite in the surface bowlders of the county constitute supplies of building material, ready to hand, which will be appreciated and utilized more and more as there is increased demand for substantial structures of every kind. The larger bowlders, as veritable granite quarries, will be systematically attacked with the best modern quarrying tools and broken into properly shaped blocks for bridge piers and heavy foundations.
Mr. Marion E. Ackley operates lime kilns at Chickasaw and supplies the local market with a product of excellent quality. It is the beds immediately below the Acervularia and stromatoporoid horizon that are used in lime burning. Lime was formerly made from the same beds at the old Bishop quarry, about a mile north of Chickasaw. Another lime kiln, which, however, has not been used for some years, is located in the southeast quarter of section 20, Bradford Township.
There is no limit to the amount of drift clays occurring in Chickasaw County, but clays suitable for the manufacture of brick and tile are not common. The objectionable feature in the drift clays is the great number of pebbles which are universally present. The blue Kansan till contains numerous limestone fragments which, even if the other pebbles could be disposed of, would effectually bar its use for the manufacture of clay products. The Iowan clay is less objectionable than the Kansan on account of its practical freedom from pebbles of limestone. The only brick yard seen in the county is that operated by Mr. Cotant about three- fourths of a mile west of New Hampton. The clay used is the upper three feet of the Iowan drift, most of it fine black surface loam or soil. The raw product is dried partly in the sun, partly on pallets under cover. The burning is done in small clamp kilns, with a capacity of 100,000 for each kiln. The plant includes a two horse-power, Iron Quaker machine of 20,000 daily capacity.
In the matter of road materials, the limestones may properly be counted among the available deposits ; but the Buchanan gravels, both in their upland and valley phases, constitute by far the most important resources of the county in this direc- tion. The siliceous pebbles mixed with a small amount of sand, just as they occur
37
CHICKASAW AND HOWARD COUNTIES
in most of the native beds, make an ideal road dressing. The material is cheap and, by reason of the wide distribution already described, it is everywhere at hand. The fine piece of road between Ionia and Chickasaw, and that leading south from New Hampton to Williamston, are impressive object lessons on the subject of what may be accomplished in the way of road improvement by a small amount of effort intelligently applied.
There are a number of beds of a fairly good grade of peat in various parts of the county. One of these is traversed by the new line of the Great Western Rail- way near the southwest corner of section 17. New Hampton Township. The peculiar prominent boggy elevations, known as "mound springs," which are seen on many of the low slopes of Iowan drift, furnishing water which may be piped down to drier ground at lower levels, are all accompanied by accumulations of peat of greater or less extent. A small but typical mound spring, with its attendant bed of peat, occurs in the southwest quarter of the southwest quarter of section 33, within a few yards of the south line of Deerfield Township. The largest amount of peaty material in one place, was seen in a bench which rises above the level of the valley gravels in the northeast quarter of the northeast quarter of sec- tion 32, Chickasaw Township. Peat is probably of no value at present, but as fuel becomes scarcer and more expensive, it may be profitable to briquette and dry the peat from some of the larger beds, and place it on the market.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.