USA > Indiana > Bartholomew County > History of Bartholomew County, Indiana : From the earliest time to the present, with biographical sketches, notes, etc. : Together with a short history of the Northwest, the Indiana Territory, and the state of Indiana > Part 25
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. . 5 in.
Fine gravel. 4 in.
Coarse gravel and sand I ft. 3 in.
Fine clean gravel. 3 in.
Coarse gravel and sand
I ft. 2 in.
Clean gravel.
2 in.
Coarse gravel and sand
2 ft. o in.
Total
9 ft. 2 in.
Here the stratification is very marked and distinct, and the strata more largely mixed with limestone fragments and chert, than at other places.
Bowlders, or erratic rocks, locally known as "nigger heads" and " blue heads," of the largest size and in greatest numbers are found on the eastern boundary line of the county. A line of bowl- ders extending from the vicinity of Milford, south into Jennings County, was noted in the early history of the country, and was supposed by some to have been the work of the Indians, who had placed them as some sign or memorial. . The largest one seen was on the land of Knox Smiley, just over the Decatur County line. It is of gray granite, and measures six by eleven feet on the sur- face, and is bedded deep in the earth. Another, on the farm of Henry Mobley, in Clifty Township, measures 8x10x6 feet. Bowl- ders two and three feet in diameter are common, but grow less frequent toward the west, but are rather common in Nineveh Township and in the clay banks of White River down to Lowell mills. In composition they are identical with the mass of stones found strewn over the Drift regions of Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and the northwest.
The glacial, yellow or ferruginous clays of Haw Creek, Clay, Clifty and Rock Creek townships, are light yellow in color, friable
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GEOLOGY.
when dry and inclined to be sticky when wet. Internately mixed with the clay are fragments of chert and limestone, torn from the underlying Niagara and corniferous strata, together with a large per cent. of metamorphic pebbles of northern origin. In the banks of the creeks and bluffs the clay never shows evidence of stratifi- cation, but not infrequently beds of sand and fine gravel are pierced in digging wells and cisterns. A bed of sand two feet thick was found in the Paul Sheets well in Columbus, below forty-five feet of white and bluish clay. These beds of sand are local, occurring in pockets that soon thin out, or are replaced by clay and gravel. The average thickness of the glacial clay, as determined from the average depth in a number of wells, is put at twenty-five feet, and varies from a few feet to many. The top soil, free from gravel, ranges from one to five feet in thickness. The clay is thinnest when subjected to the wash and action of the currents of the Terrace epoch, as in the vicinity of Otter Creek, where the water once flowed across the creek south.
The terrace clays that cap the Knobstone foot hills west of White River, are largely made up of the fine, impalpable sands and alumina arising from the decomposition of the adjacent and underlying aluminous shale. Frequently underlying the terrace clay are beds of glacial origin; especially may they be noticed in the bluffs and hills west of Columbus. Seven feet of red or yel- low clay, containing quite a number of specimens of glacial gravel, was exposed in a well at Henry Gross' farm, in Harrison Town- ship, at an elevation of 100 feet above Columbus, and glacial clay has been found near the top of the Wall ridge, but, as a rule, the clay of this region is of a much later date. The terrace clays are white, sticky and form a retentive cold soil, known as " crawfish land."
The blue bowlder clay, recognized everywhere as of glacial origin, has not been seen by us in the county. Perhaps the con- ditions favorable to the formation of a blue clay did not exist in this immediate vicinity. The yellow glacial clays of Bartholomew County are doubtless in the main the result of the disintegration of the Niagara and corniferous group rocks and the black shale, to- gether with the materials of a foreign origin, without the usual
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BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY.
admixture of the products of the blue shales, so common in the lower silurian and sub-carboniferous formations, neither one of which is crossed by the line of denudation that has formed our 'clays. Blue clays are said to be found south of this county, and probably owe their origin to the base of the Knobstone.
L'ellow Sand .- Moulders or ferruginous sand forms an impor- tant feature in the surface geology of the county, not only on ac- count of the quantity, which is considerable, but more particularly as the cap of the extreme outlying bluffs on the east and west of the White River Valley, and as being the most recent formation and deposits in the succession of time of the Terrace epoch. This deposit of sand marked the close of the Drift period. In physical appearance, where pure as left by the receding waters, and un- mixed with humus, carbonaceous clay and other foreign matter, it is always loose and mellow, with a rough feel to the touch - not im- palpable - in the vast majority of instances of a yellowish or ochery color, with occasional pockets of white sand, so clean that a shovel full of it will not render a pail of water turbid. The clean yellow sands are those that cap the bluffs and form the higher sand ridges, that have not been disturbed since they were deposited. Examined under the microscope, the fine particles show that they are of metamorphic origin, identical with the coarser sands of the Hawpatch, but without sharp points of crystallization, indicating that they have been water worn and rolled as the other glacial sands have. On the low lands and bottoms, where mixed with the products of the soil and mud of the flood plains and overflows of the rivers, they are dark, in many places after cultivation, black; in others, where much washed, of a light color.
The central line of sand ridges of the county commence at the northwest corner of Clay Township, and trend thence south to the north bank of Clifty Creek, following the bluffs of the south and west bank as a mantle over the clay to the bridge on the Colum- bus and Burnsville pike, southeast to the Lutheran Church, thence in a general course south between Elizabethtown and Azalia, cross- ing the county line and connecting with the chain of sand ridges and hills of Jackson County. Through Sand Creek Township are found parallel ridges ranging north and south, with a spur to the
287
GEOLOGY.
west that is cut by the Azalia and Mineral Spring road. By baro- metric measurement this spur was found to be twenty-five feet above the river bottoms, and is probably forty feet above high water in White River; Elizabethtown by railroad level is seven- teen feet above Columbus. The top of the bluff north of the Clifty bridge on the C. & H. pike is by the barometer seventy-five feet above the bed of the creek. These sands modified form the surface soil of Sand Creek, and a large part of Wayne Township. An isolated, and apparently an anomalous accumulation of yellow sand unmodified is found on the east bluffs of Fall Fork Creek, and on both faces of the valley locally known as the " no-head-hollow," a sharp gorge running north and south from the banks of Middle Fork to Fall Fork, above their junction. These bluffs are esti- mated to be at least 120 feet above the bed of the White River Valley. A branch of the "no-head-hollow," is known as "fox hollow," here with little labor the fox and ground hog dig their habitations, safe places of retreat in the loose sand. On the farm of Dr. Biddinger, south of David Anderson's mill, is a low sand ridge in the bottom, showing that at one time overflows must have been much higher than any of the present day. In the bends of Clifty Creek below Fall Fork, especially below Newbern, in the vicinity of Bush's mill, are points and broad accumulations of mixed sand and soil. On the west side of the great White River Valley the range of hills between Taylorsville and the Valley mills are covered on the west with yellow sand; in the vicinity of the Lowell mills the same range of hills show only a deposit of clay and clay gravel. The foot hills of the Knobstone west of Walesboro, and again in Wayne Township, are sandy.
Buried Timber .- In digging wells all over the eastern town- ships of the county at an average depth of twenty feet a bed of black earth is pierced. In appearance it is identical with a pro- ductive surface soil. This soil bed is found as a rule, not always, and rests generally on the underlying limestone, but occasionally, as in the neighborhood of Hope, is reported to have a substratum of sand and gravel. In thickness it ranges from one to six feet, and is not so much mixed with gravel and pebbles as the overlying clay. Where this black soil is penetrated, quite frequently pieces
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BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY.
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of wood, roots, masses of decayed leaves, and a thick muck are found. A large piece of timber was taken from a well on the farm of John E. Galoway, just east of Hartsville; from the well of Fran- cis Galbraith, on the county line east of town; from the well of Prof. Lewis Mobley; from the well of Mr. John Chisler, in Ilarts- ville, and from a number of other wells in Clifty and Rock Creek townships. So common are the remains of an ancient forest that an inquiry in any neighborhood will elicit the fact of leaves and wood being found buried near by. A root is reported to have been taken from the Taylor well, in Columbus, fifty feet down, but such things are not common in the central valley region. No fact connected with the history of the Drift has more indelibly fixed it- self on the minds of the masses, and no fact more conclusively con- vinces the average mind that the whole country on the east line of the county has been subjected to the violent action of water or some other force, at a time long past.
It is a well known geological fact that at the foot of the ice sheet, all over the northwest, great valley and river beds have been cut very much beyond the capacity to accommodate the streams now flowing through them; some of these ancient river beds have been silted by accumulations of sand and gravel, and the rivers flow at a higher level than they once did; others still find their old rocky bed. To the latter class belong Clifty Creek and its tributaries, Fall Fork and Dutch Creek. The Clifty Creek Valley and bed is cut through from twenty to forty feet of corniferous, and from ten to twenty-five feet of hard crystalline Niagara limestone, and the same is true of Fall Fork Creek. Perhaps nothing connected with the surface geology of the county is more singular than the beds of these creeks, great valleys eroded in the solid stone, through which now flow insignificant rivulets that are dry for almost half the year. The Duck Creek Valley has a capacity to carry a vol- ume of water as great as that flowing down White River at flood tide. It is evident that the foot of the cross flow or cross glacier, as we may call it, must have rested for a long time on and near the banks of Clifty Creek, alternately advancing and receding, with the heat of summer and cold of winter, across Haw Creek, Clay and Clifty townships, while at the foot ran mighty rivers of ice
GEOLOGY. 289
water. No other hypothesis offers an explanation of the vast amount of local erosion and denudation that has here taken place. It is probable that the ice flow down the glacial valley was con- tinued long after the cross glacier foot ceased to exist, as an ice tongue of the decadent period, shorn of its moraines, but still laden with metamorphic gravel and recent limestone pebbles. It was the long continued action of the direct valley glacier that cut away from forty to fifty feet of corniferous limestone down to black shale, west of Clay Township, planing and polishing the broad, smooth floor of the valley, now covered by the Hawpatch and lower White River bottoms.
As the general glacial sheet receded to the north, the ferrugin- ous glacial clay and remodified upland gravel beds were left on the higher lands. The decadence of the valley glacier left vast quan- tities of gravel that was more or less modified and stratified by the great rivers of ice water, that the increased heat of summer sent down from the melting snow and ice.
Of the various theories that have been proposed in explanation of the occurrence. of buried soil and timber, "ancient forest beds," found at many places in the western drift, that one is adopted pro- visionally by the writer which seems best to agree with the facts. It is well known that the glacial clay of this vicinity where exposed to the sunlight and air, will soon support vegetable life. The ice sheet receding through the influence of a warmer climate, the ex- posed ridges were soon clothed with a soil and growth of vegeta- tion that had continued to exist further south through the climax of the cold period. Along with the forest growth came the mam- moth, mastodon, reindeer, great beaver and other animals now extinct. After the general ice sheet had disappeared from a com- paratively narrow strip of territory on the southern edge of the Drift region, through changes in the climate, about the exact na- ture of which it is not necessary here to speculate, there was a recurrence of the extreme cold, the retreat of the glacier was arrested; over the exposed drift, on which a forest was growing, came an extension of the ice flow of the north, the glacial clay was rearranged, the so-called ancient soil and forest buried in some places, and wholly obliterated in others. A few things connected
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290
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BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY.
with the history of the forest bed seem to lend color to the above theory: First, the buried soil and timber is covered with glacial clay and gravel, and is strictly a phenomenon of the Drift period, We have no reports of buried timber outside of the Drift area. Second, the forest beds of Indiana and Ohio, except where possibly buried under the old deltas of Lake Erie, are found only over a narrow strip of country confined to the southern limits of the Drift. These facts militate the theory of a general submergence. By a submergence all the forest territory south of the Drift would have been buried. A local central lake, devoid of currents, could not have rearranged the glacial clay, and it is hard to comprehend how a local lake was confined to few counties on the southern border of Ohio and Indiana, no barrier has been pointed out sufficient to dam up a lake whose currents and eddies could have swept over the lower Silurian hills. An inter-glacial period of a general forest · growth certainly would have left scattered remains all over the Drift region, so far as Ohio and Indiana are concerned, with the exceptions mentioned, no such remains have been reported.
That the great body of water flowing from the foot of the re- ceding recurrent glacier, further modified the lowland gravel beds of the glacial valley and washed vast quantities of it further down the valley, is shown by the so-called Indian gravel mounds on the farm of Judge Tunis Quick, and Tipton hill in Columbus, gauges that mark what was once the depth and extent of the deposit. The Judge Quick mound having an elevation of twenty-five feet above the general surface of the surrounding country, presents a sharp bluff to the north, a gently sloping talus to the south and a swale for surface drainage on the east, all showing that the eroding power has been water, and that the currents that have cut away the gravel and left the hill standing, came from the north down the Glacial Valley.
When the glacier had retreated to the water divide, six hun- dred feet above Columbus, of Randolph and Henry counties, and covered the highlands with melting ice, the collected waters found an outlet through the White River Valley. Down the valley of the east fork came sweeping currents and floods carrying quanti- ties of yellow sand, that was left on the plains and hills where the
29I
GEOLOGY.
flood current was broken and deflected to the right or left. The bluffs of Clifty Creek on the Clay Township line formed the base of an eddy of slack waters above, that gave origin to the ridge of sand hills that extends north from the vicinity of the Columbus and Greensburg pike bridge. The retardation of the current of the flood caused the deposition of sand on the bluff sides and in the valley of Middle Fork Creek, on the hills east and north of the Val- ley mills, in German Township, and on the bluffs west of and below Walesboro. But the great mass of sand was carried beyond the points mentioned, by the torrent and left in the hills and ridges of Sand Creek 'Township, in the slack water formed below the Clifty Creek bluffs. Like influences together with the change in the course of the valley to the west through Jackson County, caused heavy deposits east and south of the more modern bed of White River. Doubtless much of the sand found over Sand Creek and Wayne Township has been spread since the close of the Terrace epoch by the rains and floods of more recent times.
' The location of the terrace clay, on the west side of the valley and in the White Creek slashes, gives a clue to their origin, and point to the conclusion that they are the products of the impalpable sand and finer materials, deposited from the sluggish waters of the glacial river, while the coarser materials were carried further to the east, where the main current flowed. This clay has been added to and modified by materials derived from the adjacent Knobstone hills. It is not necessary to invoke the existence of a great lake, the protecting influences of the Wall ridge were sufficient to favor the formation of bayous, great pools, and slashes beneath which the fine, whiteish, sticky clay was deposited.
The Glacial period closed with the Terrace epoch. That the deposition of the yellow or ferruginous sand was the last record made by the floods of the glacial valley that reached from the bluffs of Fall Fork Creek to Knobstone hills of the west is shown by the sand resting on and above the glacial clay. In depth the flood must have exceeded 150 feet, and that the flow was from the north to the south, a great rushing torrent, is shown by sand ridges only being left in the retarded current above and below the bluffs of Clifty Creek. Such must have been the closing scene of many
2
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BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY.
winters of ice and snow, the opening of spring that has ever since been followed by a perennial climate of summer as compared with that of the preceding age *.
Alluvium .- The alluvial deposits of the East White River Val- ley are made up of the varied clays, sand and gravel which are further cominuted by the action of the water, together with great stores of organic matter that are swept down by the rain storms and carried by the floods and overflows over the fat acres of the first river bottoms; thus forever adding to their perennial green- ness, at the expense of hills and valleys east and west. The allu- vium of the creeks of the east part of the county, is unimportant as their rocky banks are seldom or never overflowed; that of the . creeks of the west can not be separated from the muddy terrace clay banks through which they flow. An overflow of the mud banks of these creeks is but the addition of an other layer of sticky clay and impalpable sand, a rearranging of the old materials and the addition of decaying vegetable matter. The calcareous soil of the Hawpatch is of local origin, from the decomposition of the con- tained limestone pebbles and metamorphic gravel, to which has been added ages of vegetable growth, carbonaceous matter that has imparted a dark color to the whole mass.
Dip and Connected Section .- Starting with the datum, derived from railroad surveys, that the bed of Clifty Creek at Hartsville is II2 feet above the mouth, we find the top of the Niagara group limestones ninety-four feet below the same horizon at St. Paul, eleven miles north, and that the dip to the south is near eight and ·one-half feet to the mile. We find the level of the Niagara lime- stone eight miles east, at Adams Station, to be 156 feet above that of Hartsville, which gives the dip to the west at nineteen feet to the mile. From these measurements we estimate the general dip to be to the southwest at the rate of fifteen feet to the mile.
The following connected section of the rocks of the county is made up from measurements made in taking the local sections, and
* The reader in studying Dr. Elrod's valuable and interesting report, will observe that in some cases his observation differs from conclusions heretofore given. The subject of the drift will require much study, years of labor, and a wide area for observation. The oppos- ing deductions are here given to arouse study and investigation .- COLLETT.
1
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GEOLOGY.
presents at one view the various strata and their average thickness. The numbers in the first column are referred to in the following pages by the abbreviation, C. S., No .- , and will enable the reader by reference, to see just what age, period, epoch and stratum, where not more fully given, is under consideration in the local details.
Carboniferous Age .- Sub-Carboniferous Period .- Knobstouc
Group or Epoch.
I. Sandstone, coarse textured with bands of iron ore and shale partings. . 95 ft.
2. Sandstone, even bedded, light colored quarry stone. 40 ft.
3. Shale and sandstone in thin beds 50 ft.
4. Shale and iron ore. 90 ft.
5. Blue aluminous shale and calcareous goniatite bed 85 ft.
Devonian Age .- Hamilton Period .- Genesee Epoch.
6. Black slate. 80 ft.
Coruiferous Period .- Corniferous Group.
7. Blue crystalline quarry stone, North Vernon stone, up- per corniferous. Io ft.
8. Light blue crystalline limestone, middle corniferous. .. I2 ft.
9. Gray or earth colored limestone, soft at the top, locally hard and ochery in color, lower corniferous. 40 ft.
Silurian Age .- Upper Silurian Division .- Niagara Period .-- Niagara Group or Epoch.
10. Calcareous shale, fossil beds .. 6 ft.
II. Blue quarry stone, locally brownish in color at the top. 30 ft.
Total. 538 ft.
Local Details .- Niagara Group .- In lithological characters the blue quarry stones of the Niagara group vary from massive to thin bedded crystalline magnesian limestone with local bands of chert. Wherever it is exposed, it has been found very free from shaly or clay-partings and breaks with a square angular fracture. In physical appearance and composition, it is subject to change, in some localities being an even bedded homogeneous rock, and at
294
BARTHOLOMEW COUNTY.
others, only a few hundred feet removed, irregular, and the mass made up of chert bands and nodules. At the top of the Niagara limestone the beds change in most places by imperceptible degrees, and at others, abruptly into a hard refractory ochery-colored pseudo- limestone that occurs in thin or massive layers, generally shelly, with a conchoidal fracture. In color or structure, it seems to be persistent, showing in all the out-crops, in appearance it is very much like the base of the lower member of the corniferous group overlying the carcareous shale, nodules of calcite, crystallized car- bonate of lime, of great beauty are common to both. The calcar- eous shales, No. 10, C. S., is not always found in place, is very variable in thickness, and composition. Where not too much ex- posed to the air the color is blue, where mixed with the surface soils and weathered, is a yellowish clay. It is thin bedded, split- ting into thiner laminæ, uniform in structure, where non-fossiliferous sometimes a sticky plastic clay, and at other places intercalated with plates of fossiliferous limestone and nodules and cubes of pyrites, ferrum sulphide. The surface of the blue limestone is not a uniform level; at the foot of the Farr and Stucker holes in Clifty Creek, the top of the outcrop is just above low water mark, while at the bend of the creek between the two, below Hartsville, a ridge is cut through twenty-five feet in thickness. There is no evidence that these irregularities are synclinal or anticlinal axes, but slight ridges left at the bottom of the ocean before the overlying corni- ferous was deposited, hence there is probably a slight want of conformability between the two groups of stone.
The Niagara group stones were formed from the sediment of an interior ocean, whose eastern shore line was formed by the hills of Franklin and Ripley counties, hills that were then and have ever since reared their heads above the tide level. The nearest outcrop of the lower Silurian is seen in the vicinity of Westport, a few miles east of the Bartholomew County line. As the average thickness of the strata decrease as we go east, thinning out to a knife blade deposit, we have evidence that the waters of the ocean were shallow, but must have been very pure and quiet to favor the formation of crystalline rocks; the process of formation must have been slow and long continued to allow the growth of life, the frag-
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GEOLOGY.
ments of whose remains are here found entombed in the living rocks. As the Niagara group limestone emerged from the shallow seas, a change in the purity of the water and irregularity of the limestone bed caused deposits of argillaceous clay sediment to take place in the pockets and depressions, hence the calcareous shale is variable in thickness within a few feet and occasionally ewholly wanting, where the conditions were not favorable to the accumula- tion of a muddy sediment. A very perfect specimen of Eucaly ptocrinus crassus found in the calcareous shale, lying horizontally with the root and stem of another individual growing at right angles from the calyx, a Platyostoma niagareuse covered over with the delicate tracery of Paleschara, and on this the roots of a crinoid, together with the great number of fossils taken from these beds, show that the accumulation was very slow and that more than one generation of animal life passed before the last was covered by sediment.
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