USA > Iowa > Jackson County > History of Jackson County, Iowa; Volume I > Part 16
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While the Carboniferous outliers record a most interesting succession of events in the geologic history of Jackson county, they are comparatively unim- portant from an economic point of view. The sandstones furnish some building material, and the shales may be manufactured into various clay products wherever the deposits are large enough to justify the installation of a plant ; but in general the areas are too small to be worthy of much attention. There are remains of Lepidodendron and other coal plants in some of the Carboniferous exposures, but coal is not known to occur in the county. A situation somewhat similar to that in Jackson county occurs in Rock Island county, Illinois. A few miles east of Port Byron there is a large Carboniferous outlier resting in an old valley cut in Niagaran limestone, but this differs from the Jackson county outliers in the fact that it has furnished a large amount of merchantable coal. No coal has been found in the Carboniferous outliers of Clinton county or in the northern part of Scott. In Muscatine county and in southern Scott coal has been mined in out- lying deposits of the Des Moines stage, which rest in erosion channels carved in Devonian limestones. The events which gave Jackson county its interesting rem- nants of coal measure sandstones and shales affected a large part of Iowa.
The Pleistocene Deposits :- A very long interval, embracing the Permian pe- riod, all the periods of the Mesozoic, and all but the later periods of the Cenozoic era, separates the sandstones and shales of the Des Moines formation from the beds next in point of age appearing in Jackson county. The movements of streams and the coming and going of the sea wrought significant changes over the surface of Jackson county during the early phases of its geologic history; in later time the most important changes recorded in this area were brought about by the com- ing and going of continental sheets of glacial ice.
The Pleistocene period witnessed the advent and retreat of a number of continental ice caps in Iowa, but Jackson county presents clear records of but one
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
of these ice invasions. This county, as previously intimated, lies near the eastern edge of the area into which glaciers from the Keewatin centers of accumulation flowed, and it seems as if all but one of the ice caps which have left such re- markable records in Iowa failed to reach our territory. Among the evidences left by a retreating ice sheet, to bear perpetual witness to the fact that such ice once was present and to indicate the limits of the area that it covered, is a body of loose, heterogeneous materials known geologically as till or drift. It was the second of the known glacial invasions from the Keewatin centers that extended far enough east to spread a sheet of drift over Jackson county. This stage of glaciation is distinguished from all the others by naming it the Kansan. It was the Kansan ice, therefore, that affected our county, and the body of loose materials of glacial origin found in this area is the Kansan drift. The Kansan drift is old as compared with the drift in Winnebago, Emmett, Boone and other counties in the north central part of the state. The main body of this drift was originally a blue clay carrying a heterogeneous assemblage of rock fragments, mostly north- ern crystallines, varying in size from grains of sand and pebbles and cobbles, up to bowlders six or eight feet in diameter. The drift is thickest toward the west and south, and thins to practically zero in the northeastern part of the county. Some of the crystalline bowlders were brought by the slowly flowing ice from northern Minnesota; some came from beyond the national boundary. Since its deposition the drift mantle has been altered in various ways. It has been deeply carved and gulched by flowing water, and none of the level surface of the original drift plain remains. In the surface zone, several feet in thickness, the blue color has been changed to red or brown or yellow by weathering and oxidation; this zone has, furthermore, been leached of its original lime constituent by percolating ground waters that eventually carried it in solution to the drainage streams, or redeposited it in the form of calcareous concretions at varying depths in the body of the till. The highly altered, red or brown, oxidized portion of the drift, oc- curring in a belt some feet in thickness just beneath the surface, is sometimes called "the ferretto zone," and the thickness of the ferretto, together with the amount of alteration in the materials composing it, serves as a rough measure of the age of the drift sheet to which it belongs. All the criteria which may be used in estimating age indicate that the Kansan drift is old.
From the report on the Geology of Jackson County by Professor Savage we learn that "excellent exposures of the ferretto phase (of the Kansan drift ) may be seen along the wagon road crossing the middle of section 21 in Perry township. Reddish, pebbly drift overlain by a mantle of loess occurs near the middle of the east side of section 19, Richland township. It appears in the northwest quarter of section 31 of Otter Creek township, and at numerous other points in the south and west portions of the area.
"Crossing the north side of Maquoketa township, in sections 3, 4 and 5, there is a belt of unusually heavy Kansan drift that carries a considerable number of bowlders. Many of these are of exceptionally large size for the drift of this age, the larger masses having a diameter of six to nine feet. The monument erected to the memory of Colonel Thomas Cox, in the cemetery at Maquoketa, consists of an undressed granite bowlder six and one-half by four and one-half by three feet in size, that was taken from this bowlder train.
"In putting down a well on the Henry Little farm, in the northwest quarter of section 25, Monmouth township, a thickness of two hundred and twenty-five feet of surficial materials was penetrated without reaching indurated rock. Much the greater portion of this depth was through deposits of the Kansan stage. Such deep deposits of drift material are rare in the county, and are limited to the southern portion.
"Occasional beds of ferruginous sand and gravel are encountered. The largest deposit of such coarse material that was seen underlies a portion of the town of Maquoketa.
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
"As stated above, the finer constituents of normal drift are wanting over considerable areas. The chief witnesses to the former presence of an ice sheet in such regions are the pebbles and bowlders of foreign origin that appear at numerous points immediately overlying, or intermingled with, the residual ma- terials. The distribution of these bowlders is such as to indicate that at least a thin body of Kansan ice overspread practically the entire surface of Jackson county."
The Loess :- A deposit of fine materials, a homogeneous, yellowish clay, differing from drift in the absence of pebbles or bowlders or rock fragments of any kind larger than small grains of sand, covers the uplands and upland slopes over practically the entire county. This deposit is known as loess. As to its origin, it is wind blown dust, and much of it seems to have come from dry, ver- dureless regions to the north and northwest. Along the eastern border of the county it is possible that some of the loess was derived from dried mud flats in the flood plain of the Mississippi, in much the way that dust is still whirled up from the mud flats of the Missouri almost every day in the year. All loess is not necessarily of the same age. The conditions requisite for its accumulation are (I) a dry, bare surface that may serve as a gathering ground, (2) fairly strong winds blowing across the gathering ground, (3) some form of shelter where the dust may lodge and be permanently held. There are reasons for the belief that the bare, dried surface of the Iowan drift area, soon after the melting of the Iowan ice, but before vegetation secured a foothold, furnished the gathering ground for the greater part of the loess of Jackson county ; grasses, low bushes or other forms of vegetation afforded the requisite shelter. The loess varies greatly in thickness, ranging from practically zero to bodies having a depth of twenty or thirty feet. Its distribution originally was erratic and as lacking in uniformity as would be the distribution of snow driven by a strong wind. Since its deposition its thickness, locally, has been greatly affected by the wash incident to surface drainage.
The loess accumulated slowly. Distributed through it at all depths are shells of land snails representing successive generations that lived on the surface while the dust was gradually accumulating. The loess rests unconformably on the eroded and weathered surface of the Kansan drift, wherever this drift is present ; where there is no drift, it may rest on the country rock or on residual products of rock decay. In many respects the loess forms an ideal soil. It is free from troublesome bowlders ; it is richer in soluble compounds which plants may use as food, than the weathered Kansan or the still more weathered residual clays ; it is more porous than either residual or drift clays, and air and water penetrate it with greater freedom. On slopes at all steep the loess has the great disadvan- tage of washing readily, and trenches or gullies are rapidly cut in its surface un- less the loose materials of the deposits are held by roots of plants. Loess slopes should be kept in pasture or in forest.
Alluvium :- Alluvium is the silt, more or less fine, which turbid, swollen streams deposit on their flood plains during periods of high water, and it has its origin in materials washed by rains from the uplands. Alluvium varies in age. Wherever it occurs it has been accumulating ever since the stream had a flood plain, and the latest increment was laid down at the time of the latest flood. Al- luvial deposits occur along many of the streams of Jackson county, the more ex- tensive beds being found where the flood plains are widest-along the Mississippi and the lower reaches of the Maquoketa. Wherever the stream has cut so far below the level of its former flood plain as to leave the surface dry enough for cultivation, the alluvial plain will be found to embrace the most fertile land in the county. To quote from Savage : "The surface of lowland prairie that stretches across the central portion of Monmouth township, the southern part of South Fork and the southwest corner of Maquoketa represents a modified alluvial plain, as does that of the old Goose Lake channel in the southwest quarter of Van Buren township."
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
Sand Dunes :- Professor Savage refers to an area bordering the river in the extreme southeast corner of Tete des Morts township, where sands, shifted about by the winds, have been piled to form dunes which now cover the greater portion of the vegetation and render an area of several hundred acres almost barren. He describes the area as a modified alluvial plain-a part, indeed, of the flood plain of the Mississippi River.
Soils :- The soils of Jackson county are arranged by Savage in four classes, loess soils, sandy soils, alluvial soils and residual soils. The loess and alluvial soils are much superior to the other two classes, and it is a fortunate circumstance that sands and residual clays occupy a proportionately small part of the surface of the county. Wholly apart from considerations of fertility, the loess soils are more important than all the others by reason of the fact that they cover a much larger surface-not less than three-fourths of the total area of the county. Where the slopes are not too steep, such soils are admirably adapted to a varied range of agriculture.
In Jackson county, and the same is true of all the other counties of the state, the soils must ever remain the chief source of the wealth and prosperity of the region. The farms of Iowa add more to the value of the world's material re- sources, year by year, than all the gold mines of our planet, taken together. Sav- age presents forcibly a fact worthy of consideration when he tells us that, "The product of the farms of Jackson county for the year indicated by the 1905 census, would purchase more than one-third of all the gold mined in Alaska during the same period. Its value equals nearly one-half of all of the silver output of Col- orado during that same year. It would buy nearly three times the crude petroleum produced by the famous Beaumont oil field of Texas during this year, and more than one-half of the Beaumont production during 1902, the year of its greatest prosperity." Intelligent management of farms in a state like Iowa, in a county like Jackson, is an infinitely surer and saner road to wealth than investments in gold mines or the elusive search for oil fields.
Quarry Products :- The magnesian limestones of the Niagaran and the Galena furnish building stone and materials for lime burning at a number of points in the county. The best quarry stone comes from beds of the Gower stage in sec- tion 9, Brandon township. Plants for the manufacture of lime on a commercial scale are successfully operated by A. Hurst and Company at Hurstville, and at the Pin Hook kilns west of Maquoketa, by the Keystone Lime Company in sec- tion 32, Monmouth township, and at the Joiner's lime works in section 20 of South Fork township. The lime making industry might be enlarged indefinitely if the market conditions justified the effort and the outlay. The materials for the purpose are inexhaustible ; the quality of the product is not surpassed anywhere.
Other Economic Products :- Sands suitable for use in making ordinary mortar, and sands and gravels which may be used in connection with the various appli- cations of Portland cement, occur in abundance at many points, notably in the form of sand and gravel bars along the important streams. Clays adapted to the manu- facture of common brick and tile are found conveniently located near Preston and Maquoketa. The county is well provided with water. Streams and springs are numerous and perennial, and wells for domestic uses obtain excellent water at reasonable depths from the surface. The town of Sabula has one of the best deep wells in the state. Water in large volume and of ideal quality comes from the Cambrian sandstone at a depth of eight hundred feet, and it flows with pres- sure sufficient to distribute it wherever needed in all parts of the town. The water supply of the city of Maquoketa is obtained from a comparatively shallow well sunk in sand and gravel in the northeastern part of the town. The streams are capable of developing water power much in excess of the amount yet developed. The deep, narrow, rock walled valleys which occur in some parts of the county afford conditions favorable to the building of dams and development of power without causing overflow of large tracts of valuable land. With the many kinds of service that electricity may be made to render, and the modern facilities for
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
transmitting it over long distances, wherever it may be needed, the time is not far distant when every possible source of power will be utilized. The streams of Jackson county are among the valuable assets of the people.
NOTES ON GEOLOGY OF JACKSON COUNTY, IOWA. BY HARVEY REID.
An interesting exposure of the Des Moines Coal Measures Sandstone men- tioned by Professor Calvin in his article may be seen where the road between Ma- quoketa and Fairfield townships crosses a deep gorge which enters Maquoketa township near the southeast corner of section 13. Here had been an ancient canon or gully carved by the forces of erosion in the obdurate Niagara dolomite which the invasion of the shallow sea or marshes of the Pennsylvania era of the Carboniferous, had filled with the sands and clays and decayed vegetation of that prolific geologic age. During the succeeding ages a water channel followed the old depression and again cut a steep sided gorge to a depth of about seventy- five feet, the lower twenty feet being of thin bedded shales, some calcareous and some plastic, and overlain with about fifty feet of a reddish sandstone. The old limestone canon is thus veneered, as it were, on both faces with walls of the later formation.
The sandstones in the south part of Monmouth township, extending for more than two miles along the south side of Bear Creek present many interesting ex- posures where the frequent watercourses down the creek bluff have cut through the bright colored sandstone ledge. A deposit in section 33 which occupies the top of a hill on the right bank of Bear Creek opposite to where the road up the creek makes a sharp turn to the west, seems to be marked off, as in a picture, by the difference between the forest growth which occupies it, and the scrub oaks which grow upon the bordering limestone ledges.
The artesian wells of the county disclose the succession of rock strata which may be traced upon the surface in a direction north of east until the archean granites are reached in northern Wisconsin, one of the oldest land surfaces on the globe. The well at Sabula, drilled in 1895, the oldest in the county, is thus described in Professor Savage's Geological Survey of the county .*
"The curb of the well is a short distance below the horizon of the base of the Niagara limestone in which massive dolomite the river has here cut a gorge more than one hundred feet deep. In the first one hundred and sixty-three feet the drill passed through consolidated sand and gravel which represents the preglacial channel of the Mississippi River, excavated in the Maquoketa and the upper beds of the Galena. The thickness and elevation above tide at the base of the forma- tions penetrated are given by Professor W. H. Norton as follows :
Thickness, feet.
Above tide.
7. Alluvium, filling ancient channel.
163
419
5. St. Peter sandstone
212
207
4. Upper Oneota limestone
75
I32
3. New Richmond sandstone
25
-18
2. Lower Oneota limestone
175
-193
I. St. Croix sandstone, penetrated
198
-391
It will be seen from the above table that the drill entered the St. Croix sand- stone nine hundred and seventy-three feet below the curb. When the well was completed the discharge measured seven hundred and twenty gallons a minute. The pressure of thirty-two pounds is sufficient to furnish water and fire protec- tion to all parts of the town.
* Iowa Geological Survey, Vol. XVI, p. 647.
6. Platteville Galena
125
7
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
THE G. H. JOHNSON DEEP WELL.
The deep boring made by George H. Johnson & Company, in search for pe- troleum in the summer of 1907, while unprofitable in the purpose for which it was made, was of much interest as a contribution to scientific knowledge, and as such attracted the attention of some of our most eminent geologists. Professor Wil- liam Harmon Norton of Mt. Vernon, assistant in the Hydrographic branch of the United States Geological Survey, and Assistant State Geologist of Iowa, an expert in deep well data, visited the well in 1907, a few days before work on it ceased, and was furnished with driller's samples of all the different strata which . had been passed through.
Some time ago the writer supplied Professor Norton with the three lower- most samples to complete his set, from those left with me by Mr. Johnson. From these samples Professor Norton has made a determination by microscopic and chemical examination, of the character of the rocks passed through by the drill, and of their proper place in the geological column, and has kindly supplied us with a copy of his report, and permission to publish it.
The opportunity of having a complete set of the well drillings here, has also been utilized in a very valuable way by Superintendent E. L. Rickert, who has set in a frame a tube thirty-four inches long, covered with glass, and in that tube has poured the drillings in regular succession, each two inches representing one hun- dred feet of the well, so as to give us an accurate and graphic model of the geologic strata that underlies this locality. On a broad card filling the frame, Professor Rickert has inscribed opposite each sample its geologic place and rock characteristics as determined by Professor Norton. The exhibit will form a val- uable part of the Geological Cabinet in our high school.
The geological disclosures of the Johnson well, while not varying greatly in thickness of the various strata from those found in other wells of the same geo- logic horizon (like Anamosa, Sabula and Clinton), presents some features that are almost unique, and one that is very remarkable.
The hope of finding a deposit of petroleum in paying quantity by the boring which was done, came from the discovery of surface indications of oil on the farm of Samuel R. Earles in Maquoketa township, about six miles north of east from Maquoketa. A small round hole in the sod about thirty yards from the south line of the northeast quarter, northwest quarter of section II, township 84 north, range 3 east of the fifth principal meridian, constituted a sort of intermittent spring. It always contained water one or two feet below the opening, and at irregular intervals would overflow, but such overflow bore no positive or certain relation to rain storms. The most plausible explanation of the phenom- enon seems to be that a connection with a sink hole farther up the hill slope becomes clogged occasionally, and then breaks loose, supplying a flow of water greater than the seepage which usually drained the hole, can carry away.
It was an unfrequented pasture lot, and nothing unusual had ever been noticed in the water hole, until the early fall of 1906, when some young men from an ad- joining farm brought into town for identification, a dark, oily substance found in the hole, which was immediately recognized as petroleum.
This, naturally, created great interest and excitement. The hole was visited almost daily ; bottles and small cans dipped into the hole invariably brought up samples of petroleum which was floating on the surface of the little pool until an amount, variously estimated at a barrel or more, had been carried away. Experts and promoters soon began arriving from Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, and from the oil fields of southern Illinois, Indiana, Texas and Indian Territory, and some of them secured leases at once from farmers in the vicinity. Mr. Earles refused to lease his farm on the usual terms, but a lease of that of Peter Broderson whose north line ran within a few feet of the oil hole, was secured at once by local parties.
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HISTORY OF JACKSON COUNTY
Among those who came to investigate the oil indications was George H. John- son of Beaumont, Texas, who had formerly lived at Rock Island, Illinois. Mr. Johnson owned an interest in several prolific wells in Texas, and the show of oil in the alluvial hole on Sam Earles' farm resembled so much the oil country of Texas that had almost invariably led to rich developments that he was impressed at once with almost unbounded confidence that here was a field worth exploiting. He secured leases at once for nearly all of the farms within several miles of the locality, including that of the Broderson farm, whose local leasers were perfectly willing that others should assume the risk of deep well boring, rather than them- selves, and later also obtained a lease of the Earles farm at a liberal price.
Other Texas men joined Mr. Johnson in financing the adventure. He brought from Beaumont, Colonel S. H. Clarke, an experienced driller, as superintendent, and employed McIntire and Kelley of Casey, Illinois, to do the drill- ing. Their drilling outfit was of first class capacity, and they engaged to go down two thousand feet, or even three thousand feet if required. Drilling began April 26, 1907, and continued until July 12, when the well was abandoned, no oil having been found. The depth attained as shown by the daily log, was one thousand seven hundred and sixteen feet, but a correction made with a steel line measured after drilling ceased showed actual depth to be one thousand seven hundred and seven feet. We use the first named figures in the geological section, in order not to disturb the true proportion of strata thicknesses. The locality chosen for the well is on the Broderson farm, a few rods from the line separating it from the Earles land, or about fifty yards from the oil hole.
It lies in a practically driftless region, being in one of the "loess free" tracts of which there are several in Jackson county. They are interpreted by Frank Leverett, the distinguished United States Geological Survey geologist, who is devoting his time to the study of glacial geology, as being caused by great stagnant masses of ice of the Iowan period, melting slowly while loess hills were being deposited by winds in the intervals where thinner ice had already melted. This particular tract can be studied on the Andrew road, where bare rock exposures with very thin or no covering of loess clay, may be seen bounded by the loess hill at Bridgeport on one margin and that near the Perry township line on the other. The mouth of the well is about seven hundred and sixty feet above the level of the sea, being on a hill slope about forty feet lower than its summit.
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