USA > Iowa > Allamakee County > Past and present of Allamakee county, Iowa. A record of settlement, organization, progress and achievement, Vol. I > Part 9
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Wherever an exposure of several feet of greenish-blue clay and shales with layers of limestone, all containing fossil corals and brachiopods, is seen any- where in the south half of Allamakee county it may be safely set down as Decorah shale.
Probably it is nowhere better exposed than in its numerous outcrops in the vicinity of Waukon.
Overlying the Decorah shale, and resting on it conformably, is from 200 to 250 feet of bedded limestone known as the Galena limestone. This is the lead bearing limestone of the Galena-Dubuque region but it contains no lead ore in Allamakee county. At Dubuque it consists of massive dolomite but in Alla- makee, of thin bedded strata of carbonate of lime rock, separated in places by thin shale and clay partings. It is a hard rock weathering slowly into vertical cliffs with a tendency to recede at their bases, where cut through by streams. Fine exposures can be seen in the vicinity of Myron, on the southeast, southeast
70
ORTHOCERATA FROM GALENA LIMESTONE
TRILOBITE, ISOTELUS MAXIMUS, FROM THE LOWEST STRATA OF THE ELGIN LIMESTONE, ELGIN, IOWA
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
of section 17, in Post township, and along the north line of section 18 in Franklin township.
In all this great body of limestone there is little really good building stone, the strata being for the most part too thin, irregular or fragmentary. The whole formation is much broken up by two sets of fissures or crevices which intersect each other nearly at right angles.
These crevices are the cause of the "sinkholes" found in Ludlow, Post, and Jefferson townships, the overlying loess and soil having been washed down into the crevices leaving funnel shaped depressions in the surface.
The Galena is usually a dry rock, the numerous fissures giving the under- ground water a chance to run off to lower levels.
Fossils are not abundant except at certain horizons and are usually in the form of casts. Gasteropods and orthoceratites are the most common. At about twenty-five feet above the base, a fossil commonly spoken of as a "petrified sun flower" occurs quite plentifully. It was not a sunflower at all-not even a plant, but was an ancient sponge. At a higher level, not far below the top of the forma- tion, it is again found, but not so plentifully.
The Galena merges so gradually into the overlying Elgin limestone of the Maquoketa formation that the division line may be said to be an arbitrary one. There is a change in the fossils,-gasteropods, the most abundant fossil of the Galena, giving way to trilobites in the Maquoketa. This member of the forma- tion has a thickness of eighty feet and is succeeded by the Clermont shale, a bed of blue clay and limestone with a thickness of thirty feet. In these shales are found some finely preserved fossil brachiopods, of different species and larger size than those in the Decorah shales. In the limestone below is found the first coiled chambered orthoceratite.
As the Clermont shale is impervious to water it holds that which enters the ground above it from going lower. Underlying the southwest part of Post township at a depth of sixty to one hundred feet, good wells are had there with an abundant supply of pure water by drilling down to, but not through it. It is from this clay bed that the Clermont white brick is made. The highest and newest formation of indurated rock found in Allamakee county is the Fort Atkin- son limestone, a yellow crumbly limestone containing much chert, a few small outcrops of which are found in the southwest part of Post township.
Altogether there is exposed in, and underlies the county, over 1,000 feet of beds of stratified limestones, sandstones, and shales and clays as shown in the ideal section in the plates at the end of this article. Seven hundred feet of Dres- bach sandstone lies below the Mississippi river, so we may say that we have studied a stratified layer of the earth's crust one-third of a mile in thickness.
Ages long was the time it took to lay down this thousand feet of sand and clay and lime at the bottom of the oceans of the hoary past. Ages long has been the time since the receding shores left the region we have been studying high and dry above the waters. And through these latter ages heat and cold, snow and rain and ice, frost and percolating water and wind, have been busy tearing down, dissolving and wearing away that which it had taken so long to build up, carrying it away to newer oceans and laying it down again in newer deposits of sand and clay and lime.
Vol. 1- 5
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
It is estimated that erosion lowers the entire valley of the Mississippi river one foot in five thousand years.
There is no doubt but that since the wearing away of the Mississippi valley began it has been lowered many hundreds of feet. At one period for thousands of years it was held in the grip of the great glacier that plowed off the ridges and filled in the valleys of the ancient watercourses. Part of Allamakee, Clay- ton and Dubuque counties alone of all Iowa escaped.
The oldest glacier, the Kansan, invaded the southwest part of the county, traces of it being found as far east as Waukon. Only a remnant of its ground moraine is left in places under the loess. A few inches or feet of red sandy clay filled with pebbles of granite, greenstone and quartz. The best exposure of this till in the county is probably the one to be seen beside the road from Waukon to Postville on the section line on the east side of the northeast, northeast, sec- tion 34, town 98, range 6.
A lobe of the later lowan glacier covered a few sections in the extreme southwest of the county. Time enough intervened between the melting away of the Kansan ice and the oncoming of the Iowan, for an abundant forest growth to take possession of the land, continuing long enough to form a bed of humus and soil one to two feet thick .- a thicker bed than is found in the forests of this age in this locality. In digging wells at Postville this ancient soil or "forest bed" as it is called is struck at a depth of twenty to forty feet from the surface between the till left by the Iowan glacier and that of the older Kansan. Pieces of roots, trunks and twigs of trees are found in this old soil.
When the great Iowan glacier that lay to the west of us was receding, the rivers that reached it, like the Turkey, the Oneota and the Root, were enormously swollen by the flood of water from the melting ice. This water was heavily laden with silt, and sand and pebbles were carried down by the current.
It is this silt, sand and pebbles, left by those floods, that formed the benches or terraces of the Oneota, and the other rivers named, and of the Mississippi at New Albin, Harper's Ferry, Prairie du Chien, Guttenberg and other places.
A few pieces of native copper are said to have been found in the county. Such were undoubtedly brought from the Lake Superior region by the Indians to be used in making their copper implements and ornaments, many of which are found with other prehistoric relics in the Oneota and Mississippi valleys.
Gold dust has been found in the sand deposits washed out of the lowan drift, just over the line on the Judge Williams farm in Clayton county. Near the farm buildings is a pit in one of these sand out-washes, and to it the barnyard fowls resorted for gravel, and from their crops at different times several dozen flakes of gold were taken. It is supposed that the chickens, attracted by the shiny gold, picked it out of the sand. There are no similar deposits in Allamakee. At one time considerable excitement was occasioned by the reported discovery of gold in the cherty strata of the Oneota limestone near Prairie du Chien, and some mining operations were commenced but were soon abandoned. Whether or not there really were traces of gold in the rock at that place is not known.
About two miles north and a half mile east of the corporate limits of Waukon, in the center of section 17, Makee township, is a deposit of iron ore having an area of about two hundred and forty acres.
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
This ore deposit known as the "Iron Hill" is the highest point in Allamakee county, having an elevation of 1,320 feet above sea level.
Another high point along the south line of the southeast quarter of section 27 in the same township is capped by a much smaller deposit, and about a mile east of this near the Fan school, at a lower elevation, some boulders can be seen by the roadside.
At both the first named places the ore with its associated impurities occurs as a lenticular deposit, having its greatest thickness at the center,-about seventy feet in the Iron Hill,-and thinning out to nothing at the edges.
The Iron Hill deposit rests on limestone of lower Galena formation, that on section 27 probably on rock of the same formation, though possibly on Decorah shales or Platteville. Over both deposits there is a thin veneer of from one to three feet of yellow loess. The ore itself occurs in abundant small flakes, scales, and particles, called wash ore, disseminated through the associated clays, and in irregular concretionary masses of all sizes from those of a few inches in diameter up to many feet. These larger "boulders" are found at any level, some- times singly and at others bunched together in large masses. All the "chunks" and "boulders" are filled with very irregular pockets and cavities, some of which are empty, some lined with crystallized ore, and some containing different colored clays or sand.
The impurities associated with the ore are residual clays, sand and chert, and these form quite a considerable part of the whole, the entire deposit forming a very heterogeneous mass.
Fossils of the lower Galena are found scattered through the deposit seemingly at all horizons, in places being quite common. Sometimes they are found imbedded solidly in fragments of ore broken from the boulders. Perhaps the most common is the coral, Streptelasma Corniculun.
Professor Calvin advanced the theory that this was a deposit of bog ore formed by precipitation from the waters of a marsh or bog that were highly charged with iron oxide. This accumulation of iron ore at the bottom of bogs and marshes in this way is quite common in parts of New Jersey and Pennsyl- vania. He supposed the existence of an ancient marsh surrounded by higher ground. As time passed the surrounding land or rock was eroded away until it became lower than the more resistant ore bed which resisted as a high point, afterward being covered by loess.
If this theory be true then the rocks of the land around this marsh could not have been of later age than the lower Galena, as none of the fossils washed out of that surrounding rock into the marsh and now found in the ore bed, are of later age than the lower Galena. Also as the existence of marshes implies a flat country with little drainage, and as all the ore deposits occurring near Waukon were evidently laid down at the same time, and most likely were formed in dif- ferent parts of a chain of marshes of the same age, these ores may be of very ancient formation, since the entire valley of Village creek may have all been cut down since that time.
At certain places in the deposit are found very compact chunks and boulders of ore filled with smoothly rounded, waterworn pebbles of different varieties of quartz, greenstone and other rocks usually associated with the drift, of a size from one-eighth to one inch in diameter. Such pieces of ore are usually so hard
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
that in breaking them up the line of fracture will run through ore and pebbles alike.
Identically the same kind of small pebbles are found in abundance under the loess and on top of both limestone and St. Peter sandstone in the vicinity of the ore deposit.
These pebbles may have found their way here from the north by some very ancient drainage system that disappeared years ago, or they may be outwash from or residue of the Kansan or lowan glacier, in which case our ore bed is com- paratively recent.
If the deposit is a bog formation of an old marsh in the ancient preglacial peneplain, then the presence of quartz pebbles and other foreign rocks transported from localities hundreds of miles to the north presents an interesting phenomenon, not easy to account for.
On the other hand the absence of glacial till under or around the ore deposit ; the character of the associated clays and sands which seem to be clearly residual rock products and not derived from drift ; and the fact that all the evidence goes to show that the valley of Village creek separating the two principal deposits, and of all other streams in Allamakee, were cut down to their present levels in preglacial times, shows a preglacial origin. In fact it is pretty well settled that the topography of the county was almost wholly (except in the river valleys) formed before the coming of the ice.
Besides waters drained from any probable tributary area of till would not be likely to contain sufficient iron in chemical solution to form so large a deposit. It is true that the Buchanan Gravels, an outwash from the Kansan, are often much stained and cemented by iron, but nowhere is there more than enough to make more than a few inches of ore if the gravels were removed.
To Mr. Chas. Barnard, a pioneer resident of Waukon, belongs the credit of first calling attention to this ore deposit.
About the year 1900 local capital was interested, a concentration plant built, and the development of a mine begun.
The plant was located near the center of the area, on a re-entrant of the east edge, and consisted of a crusher and log washer driven by steam power.
The ore was freed from flint by hand picking.
A pit having an area of about one-fourth acre was excavated to about one-half the depth of the ore bed, and the resultant cleaned product shipped to different markets. But a number of causes, chief among which was the cost of hauling by team from the mine three miles to the railroad, operated to make the venture unprofitable and work was abandoned.
About 1909 the interests of the local company, the Waukon Iron Company, were acquired by the Missouri Iron Company of St. Louis, Missouri. This com- pany has erected a large concentration plant for the reduction of the ore, to which a spur railroad has been built from Waukon.
The work is in charge of Mr. R. W. Erwin, by whom a paper further describing this ore deposit and the processes used by his company in concentrating it is found elsewhere in this volume.
BRACHIOPODS FROM DECORANI SHALES
1-Orthis subaequata. 2-Rynchotrema inaequivalvis. 3-Orthis tricenaria. 4- Orthis plicatella. 5-Strophomena septata. 6-Lingula jowensis, 7-Orthis testu- dinaria. 8-Orthis bellarugosa. 9-Leptaena, sp.
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
IRON HILL
The deposit covers an area of one-half mile east and west by one mile north and south and is slightly in the shape of a crescent with its terminal points to the northeast and southeast, and is situated in township 98, range 5 west of the fifth principal meridian in section 17, and is some two and one-half miles north by east of Waukon, Iowa, and has an extreme elevation of 1,320 feet, although ore is found at an elevation of 1,250 feet. This is one of the highest points in the state and is the highest point in a direct north and south line between the Lakes and the Gulf.
GEOLOGICAL CHARACTER
In general the conditions are similar to those encountered in the Brown ore deposits of the southern States, being different, however, in the fact that there is very little or no sand associated with the residual clay. It is a brown ore, a hydrated sesquioxide of iron and is made up of probably the following types:
Composition
Chemical Formula
Iron Ox.
Water
Turgite
2 Fe2O3 I H2O
94.7
5.3
Gothite
2 Fe2O3 2 H2O
89.9
IO.I
Limonite
2 Fe2O3 3 H2O
85.5
14-5
ยท Xanthrosiderite
2 Fe2 O3 4 H2O
81.6
18.4
in which the Limonite predominates, next in order coming Gothite with small quantities of Turgite and Xanthrosiderite. They resemble most of all the Oris- kany ores of Virginia.
The body rests upon a limestone strata of the Lower Silurian age (Galena Trenton) which has a depth of some forty feet, while the ore varies in depth from one inch to seventy-three feet. Below the limestone is the St. Peter sand- stone with a depth of some ninety feet. Below this is the Oneota limestone some two hundred and fifty feet thick, when the Jordan sandstone is encountered. This is the water-bearing stratum of the country. The ore is concretionary and varies in size from a fraction of an inch to aggregations weighing twenty tons. At times these concretions are solid; other times they contain cavities which may be filled with sand in various stages of impurity-clay and round pebbles of clay. These cavities vary in size from a fraction of an inch to a foot or more and possess the spherical shapes usual in nodular structures.
The ore body contains throughout its entirety, clay, gravel, sand, chert or flint nodules of various forms and shapes. In some instances the sand and gravel are cemented together by the iron, forming masses of considerable size. This also holds true of the gravel. The boulders of conglomerate are found in all parts of the deposit-in the richest as well as the leanest.
The ore as it occurs in situ has the following analysis :
Iron
31.82 per cent
Phos. .207 per cent
Manganese
.60 per cent
Silica
41.80 per cent
Alum
7.27 per cent
Water
6.40
per cent
638679
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
This may be taken as an average. Samples may be taken which will run 60 per cent in iron.
It is generally assumed that all brown ore bodies are replacement bodies in limestone. Suffice it to say that this deposit is of recent origin, owing to its depth and the very large number of rounded quartz pebbles which may be found. Another fact is the round clay balls often found on the interior of large boulders of ore.
The ore is of two classes: Wash Ore and Boulder Ore. By wash ore is meant the smaller concretions embedded in clay. Boulder ore is solid and the masses are separated by joints of clay.
The body is estimated to contain 10,000,000 tons of ore.
In January, 1907, Iron Hill, as it was locally known. was brought to the atten- tion of Mr. Edward F. Goltra, of St. Louis, Missouri, who turned the prospect over to Mr. R. W. Erwin. The prospect looked favorable, and as Mr. Goltra and associates were in the market for an iron mine at that time, after further investi- gation, R. W. Erwin came to Waukon and secured an option on the property from the Waukon Iron Company and at once made arrangements for the explora- tion of the property by drilling and test pitting. This property was sufficiently explored so that Mr. Goltra and his associates felt that there was sufficient ore for a commercial period.
The next thing to be done after finding out that there was sufficient ore, as the ore was of low grade, was that of finding a process of concentrating the ore in a commercial way. After going into the matter thoroughly it was decided to locate an experimental plant at Waukon Junction, Iowa, as it was intended to use water as a cleaning agent. This was done and a plant was thoroughly equipped with crushers, washer, jigs, rolls, tables and roaster for trying out a number of processes in a commercial way. A series of experiments covering some two years was undertaken to find out the best and most economical method of treating the ore. In trying out the various methods and when practically all the experiments had been completed, a process of dry treatment had been evolved. In this no water was used, heat and electricity being the agents employed. In view of this fact it was decided to vacate the plant entirely at the Waukon Junction and put the concentrating plant closer to the mine.
A plant site and right of way was purchased and in 1910 a railroad was built to the mine and work on a permanent plant started. This was completed in June, 1912 and increased in 1913. The method of treatment consists essentially in first drying the ore as it is mined by steam shovels, going from there to the crushers, screening out the finer particles of sand and clay in a large screen and cobbing out the larger size gangue, roasting and reducing the ore from Fe2O3 to Fe,O, and magnetically separating the product below one-half inch in size. The method is entirely original and is in use in no other place in the world. and has been devised and worked out on a commercial basis at Waukon. The com- pany has now completed a plant which will have a capacity of 350 to 400 tons of finished iron ore per day. It is expected to increase this capacity to 1,000 tons per day. The ore is especially desirable for making pig iron for open hearth use. The concentrated ore has an analysis of from 55 to 61 per cent metallic iron ; 8 to 12 per cent silica ; . 50 to 1.25 per cent manganese, with phosphorous slightly above the Bessemer limit. Owing to its physical character-viz .- large
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
pieces from one-fourth to two and one-half inches in diameter, make it a specially desirable and easy working ore in the blast furnace. Owing also to its porous character which has been left by the expulsion of combined water, it "comes down" very easily in the blast furnace, and requires less fuel for smelting than the Mesaba ores. The ore as it occurs in the ground is known as a hydrated sesquioxide of iron, or, a brown hematite, containing from 10 to 14 per cent of combined water. It is to relieve the ore of this water and also of the free water and to free it of clay and sand and prepare it for reduction that the drying and roasting is given it.
The property was more thoroughly explored in 1910 for the Missouri Iron Company by the Wisconsin Steel Company. In all, some 300 test pits and drill holes have been put down to bed rock, and 10,000 analyses made.
The Missouri Iron Company now have a thoroughly equipped and up to date plant. The power plant contains two 220-hp. Westinghouse gas engines, direct connected to generators and a 440-hp. automatic gas producer with the necessary scrubbers ; one 250 hp. motor generator set ; a deep well, 400 feet deep, equipped with an eight and three-fourths inch Downie pump, which affords an abundant supply of pure water. Machine shop and blacksmith shop adjoin power plant. Crushers, screens, dryer, roasters, reducers, sizer, magnetic separators, bins, etc., are of steel construction of very best type. All the machinery is individually motor driven. Ore is brought from the mine in seven-yard electric cars which are under the control of central operators. The ore is blasted and then loaded into cars by a 70-ton, two and one-half yard, Vulcan steam shovel. Track is standard gauge and laid with 60-lb. rails-double tracks, one for loaded cars, the other for empty cars. Coal is received in hopper-bottom cars and dumped directly into bins. All departments of the plant are connected with the office by a central telephone station. A complete chemical laboratory is maintained.
The officers of the company are as follows: Edward F. Goltra, president, St. Louis, Missouri; Thomas S. Maffitt, vice president, St. Louis, Missouri ; J. D. Dana, treasurer, St. Louis, Missouri; R. W. Erwin, general manager, Waukon, Iowa.
The regular working staff at Waukon consists of R. W. Erwin, manager and superintendent ; Harry Orr, chief engineer : R. F. Burkhart, electrical engineer ; Ernest Wander, chemist ; Will Riley, chief clerk.
. The foregoing sketch of the iron mine at Waukon, and the plant there installed by the Missouri Iron Company, was prepared at our request by Mr. R. W. Erwin, the resident manager. A detailed history of the gradual development of this mine cannot be given here, but an outline of the steps taken to bring the deposit to the attention of capitalists who could and would demonstrate its value as an important addition to the resources of Allamakee county, may be briefly stated. The main body of this tract came into the possession of Mr. John M.Barthell in the year 1875; and it was about this time that Mr. Charles Barnard began to insist that it contained a remarkable deposit of iron ore. Mr. Barnard came from an iron region, the vicinity of Pittsburg, and had a sufficient practical acquaintance with iron mining to know what he was talking about, however skeptical others might be. He enlisted in the cause Mr. A. M. May, editor of the Waukon Standard, who gave much attention to the matter in his columns, and the articles were widely copied and soon began to bring correspondence
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PAST AND PRESENT OF ALLAMAKEE COUNTY
from iron men. Mr. Barnard, though engaged in other business, devoted much time to correspondence with a view to interest practical men of means in the' enterprise, working early and late to bring about an investigation that would prove, what he fully believed, the practicability of working this mine with profit, to the great advantage of his community. Various parties visited the place, and numerous analyses were made of the ore, all indicating a paying percentage of iron, but all attempts made to negotiate working leases proved futile, from one cause or another. Some of the difficulties were the distance from water and fuel, and the absence of railroad transportation facilities.
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