USA > Massachusetts > Hampshire County > Gazetteer of Hampshire County, Mass., 1654-1887 > Part 2
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I2
HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
If now we were further to imagine the sandstones and traps removed, we should look from the high ground of Westhampton or Pelham upon a deep, broad valley ; in places, and perhaps everywhere, more than a half-mile deeper than the present valley, and thus more than a half-mile below the present sea level. The Holyoke and Mt. Tom ranges would be gone, and we should look across a valley fifteen miles wide and detect no marked elevation except Mt. Warner and the rocky ridge on which Amherst is built. The same ancient crystalline rocks which make the eastern and western highlands would then form also the bottom of the deeper valley.
These considerations mark out the threefold division natural to our subject, viz .:-
I. (a.) The character and origin of the ancient crystalline rocks which underlie everything else in the valley, and form the high lands on either side.
(b.) The changes of folding and erosion by which the deep valley and the bordering highlands were made.
II. (a.) The character and origin of the sandstones and traps.
(b.) The erosion by which they were planed down to their present surface.
III. (a.) The character and origin of the hardpan, gravels and clays.
(b.) The erosions by which they have been affected, down to the present time.
The rocks of the first series were deposited probably as marine sediments, with intercalated eruptive rocks, in that earliest period of the earth's history, from which no certain vestiges of life have come down to us (Azoic, Eozoic or Archaean), and their formation continued through an unknown portion of the second great period (Paleozoic). The remainder of this period was taken up with the completion of the folding, and with the erosion of much of that which had been brought together in the first portion.
The rocks of the second series (the sandstones) were laid down in the deep valley formed by the erosion of the latter portion of the second period, this valley becoming for a time a fjord which stretched north across Con- necticut to the north line of Massachusetts, at the beginning of the third great era of the earth's history (the Mesozoic), and during the remainder of this period and the early portion of the next and last of these great ages (the Cenozoic) an erosion of enormous duration swept out of the valley the major portion of the sandstone which had been gathered in it, and left the trap beds like the ribs of a great skeleton stretched across the valley.
The rocks of the third series, the hardpan, gravel, sand, and clay, were deposited when the county was again submerged, this time beneath the frozen waters of the great glacier, and when, on the recession thereof, all its valleys were filled with the superabundant waters from the melting of the ice, which waters as they sank towards the dimensions of the present rivers, changed gradually from filling up to eroding agents, carving out the terraces along the river sides, which form the last charm of the valley scenery.
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
The history of the area has been thus, in brief : first, a huge submergence, perhaps not uninterrupted, during which the oldest and the main body of its rocks (new crystalline) were deposited ; second, a huge dry-land period of erosion, when the main contours of the region were blocked out; third, a second fjord period of submergence, for the valley alone, when the sand- stones were laid down, and a transcient series of volcanoes diversified the scenery ; fourth, a second erosion, which formed down the broad valley the narrow channel-way of the pre-glacial Connecticut river ; fifth, a third sub- mergence beneath the ice and succeeding floods of the glacial and post-glacial ages, which spread the loose material over the surface ; sixth, by the terrace- making period, of which the "meadows " are the most valuable contributions.
THE CRYSTALLINE ROCKS.
The time-honored comparison of the folded rocks which make the earth's crust, to a pile of strips of cloth of various colors which have been laid upon a flat surface and then crumpled into close parallel folds by horizontal pres- sure, is quite adequate to make clear the present position of the oldest rocks in the county, if we suppose that the crumpling force worked from west to east, and that erosion has cut the whole down to the present upper surface of these rocks. The result of this is that the rocks cross the county in bands, from north to south, and dip, for the most part, steeply to east or west. The important members which make up this series are as follows, in the order of their age, the newest above :-
The calciferous mica schist.
The hydromica schist,
The hornblende schist.
The feldspathic mica schist.
The gneiss.
The Gneiss .- This is the well-known and excellent quarry stone of Becket, Pelham and Monson. It is made up of quartz, feldspar and mica. The feldspar is largely plagioclose, and is marked by delicate striation of the cleav- age faces. It is in fresh, colorless, transparent grains, often difficultly distin- guishable from the quartz, the two minerals together making a colorless gran- ular mass in which the fresh black scales of the biotite, or the jet-black grains of the hornblende are strongly contrasted, and blend to form the clear gray of the rock. Much of the rock is sub-porphyritic in three ways. It is blotched by large grains or rounded aggregations of orthoclase, by distant aggregations of biotite, or by quite large, squarish crystals of hornblende. Very often it is "stretched," that is, on the surface of the broad slabs into which it splits naturally, the black mica flakes or the feldspar blotches are seen to be strewed along in parallel lines and long narrow streaks across the surface as if the whole had been stretched when in a plastic condition. Py- roxene, titanite and garnet are occasionally found, the second quite commonly. Zircon, rutile and apatite are common microscopic constituents.
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
The western band of the rock occupies the western portion of the county, west of a north and south line drawn through the village of Middlefield, and contains the important quarries of this town and Becket. A portion of this gneiss, in the extreme northwestern corner of the town, lies unconformably below the rest, and is apparently considerably the older. It is a coarser, more compact, flesh-colored or grey gneiss, which contains, in the neighbor- ing town of Hinsdale, a bed of coarse crystalline limestone, with chondrodite, discovered by Prof. J. D. Dana. This mineral occurs apparently only in the oldest rocks. It is true, however, that a band of limestone, occurring where the railroad crosses Cole's brook in the upper portion of the gneiss, also con- tains chondrodite, in part changed to serpentine.
The second band of the gneiss crosses Shutesbury and Pelham, and ends just south of the village of Belchertown, against a great block of an eruptive rock which occupies the whole southern portion of the town. The gneisses of this band are characterized by a nearly horizontal foliation, and they are thinner bedded and more uniformly "stretched" than those of the other bands. A thick bed of an actinolitic quartzite can be traced in a curiously complex course across the band, dividing it into an upper and an under portion.
At the " Asbestus mine" in Pelham and in the middle of Shutesbury, occur two lenticular beds of an olivine-enstatite rock, associated with massive anorthite and tourmaline, with biotite containing hornblende and corundum, and with many products of the decomposition of these minerals, ending with asbestus, vermiculite and serpentine.
The third band runs down through the Prescott-Greenwich-Enfield- Ware valley, and in its southward continuation are the celebrated quarries of Monson. It is in the portion extending across the county more contorted and complexly twisted in its foliation than the other bands. It is distin- guished from the other bands by its position at the bottom of a valley, and by the absence of the accessory beds described as occurring in them. I am inclined to explain this lower position by assuming the gneiss to have been faulted down into its present position, rather than entirely by the more rapid disintegration and removal of the gneiss.
The assumption that these three bands are parts of one and the same sheet, is in a degree hypothetical, as they are not seen in contact. I have, how- ever, little doubt that they are continuous beneath the newer rocks ; that like a letter "w " the band in the west of the county goes beneath the newer rocks, comes up in the Pelham band, and again rises in the Enfield band. In these two folds the later beds are included like nests of boxes of very unequal widths, and of very unequal degrees of complexity, for the one extends from Middlefield across to Pelham, and the newer beds have several subordinate folds, while the other band extends north and south in a narrow strip through the towns of Ware, Enfield and Greenwich.
The Feldspathic Mica Schist .- This appears in a band running east of the
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
village of Middlefield, and along the west line of Worthington, and it reappears apparently in greatly altered form along the western foot-hills of Pelham and Belchertown, and in Amherst. It is a coarse schist, mainly composed of quartz and muscovite, the latter often hydrated, carrying considerable feldspar, and characterized by large garnets often changed to chlorite.
It is represented in the eastern band by a bed of an arenaceous muscovite- biotite gneiss, which lies between the biotite gneiss below, and the hornblende schist above, on each side of the band.
The Hornblende Schist .- Next inward is the hornblende schist, which, in the western band, enters the county just where the road between Chester and Middlefield enters the latter town. It is in Chester a broad band, making the whole of West mountain above the town, and having the famous emery bed on its eastern border. Where it enters Middlefield it is almost wholly replaced by a great bed of serpentine, which runs, with a width of above a hundred rods and a length of above a mile, up nearly to the middle of the town, and in its further course it is accompanied by several other similar beds of serpen- tine, which seems in each case within the limits of the county to be derived from the hornblende schist itself. Other beds associated with the schist beyond the limits of the county are derived from pyroxene and enstatite rocks.
The hornblende schist is a heavy, black rock, generally thin fissile, with the fine black needles of hornblende having mostly a common direction. It is very constantly epidotic, quartzose, and non feldspathic.
On the eastern border, the band of this rock is not exposed continuously across the county. I have found it just south of North Amherst station, and traced it thence to Belchertown, where it folds over the gneiss and is continuous with the western strip of the same rock bordering the eastern band on its western side. This junction of the two rocks takes place through the village of Belchertown, and the further southward extension of both bands is cut off by the intrusion of the Belchertown syenite, whose contact influence upon this and the surrounding beds will be described later. The schist is lithologically identical in the two bands.
The Hydromica Schist .- This is the " chlorite schist" of earlier writings. It extends in a north-south band across the county, occupying the eastern part of Middletown and the western part of Worthington, Cummington and Plainfield.
It is a gray schist, generally quartzose, and splitting into flat flags which have a soft feel from the altered muscovite, and very often carry large gar- nets, which are in twenty-four sided forms and are often changed more or less into a green chlorite, and other small patches of the same green chlorite occur commonly in the rock.
As a result of a subordinate fold, it crops out just west of the village of Goshen, and comes up on the eastern border of the basin in Williamsburg, where it is, in a limited way, associated with hornblende schist, but where it is for the most part replaced by granite.
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
In the eastern band two strips run across the county with some loops and minor irregularities. In Quabin Mt., south of Enfield, it is represented by a fine fire stone, the muscovite being silvery white and scanty, while farther north, across Enfield and Prescott, some biotite is associated with the mus- covite, making a " two mica quartzite," which, at times, graduates into a gneiss. Toward the south it graduates into a rock not distinguishable from the type described above for the western band, as may be seen a little beyond the limit of the county, in the high hill southwest of Palmer depot.
The Calciferous Mica Schist .- From a line drawn through the middle of Plainfield, Cummington and Worthington, the whole region east to the bor- der of the valley is occupied by the rocks of this series, crumpled into several subordinate folds, except where, in Goshen and Williamsburg, the older rocks protrude, and where, in the towns last mentioned and in North-West-and Southampton, great areas are occupied by granite.
It is a muscovite schist, generally dark colored from an admixture of finely divided carbon, barren in its lower portions, but in the upper full of garnet, staurotite, kyanite, and small biotite crystals, set transversely to the bedding. It splits into thin flags and is used for paving. Subordinate beds of a fine-grained arenaceous biotite schist (whetstone schist) afford the finest scythe stones.
Other beds of a fine-grained granitoid gneiss occur, and beds of a black biotitic hornblendic limestone, bounded above and below by a thin layer of hornblende schist, so that when blocks of the limestone have been exposed to long weathering, the limestone wears away more rapidly than the cappings of schist, and the curious anvils and tables found now and then are produced. On the east side of the basin, much of the schist of Mt. Warner and under- lying Amherst is of this or the preceding type, but so changed by impreg- nation with granite that the two cannot be separated. This closes the series in the western basin. In the eastern, only the lower barren mica schist separates in a narrow strip the two bands of the last described rock ; but a little north and south of the county the strip becomes wider and is then the same dark biotite-spangled ganetiferous mica schist as in the western area. It contains everywhere fibrolite, generally in small amount.
The Fibrolite Gneiss and Schist .- I have thus described two synclinals, or downward folds of a series of rocks into the gneiss. Just on the eastern bor- der of the county, in Ware and just entering Greenwich, is a third repetition of the same series in the same order; two mica gneisses, hornblende schists, mica schists, but all become abundantly fibrolitic. I have mentioned above that, in the eastern of the two series there described, fibrolite occurs com- monly in the mica schists, and I have traced these two bands northwesterly beyond the limits of the county, to where, in the north of Orange, they bend round the gneiss and unite, so that the fibrolite band is only a somewhat more altered form of the same series we have already described.
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
THE ERUPTIVE ROCKS OF THE OLDER SERIES.
Granite .- The rock we have described as gneiss is very commonly called granite, and, indeed, much of it, especially the fine quarry stone of the west- ern band is, in the largest blocks, so entirely free from any parallel arrangement of its constituents that it quite exactly matches the more technical definition of granite. In the quarry, however, these blocks are seen to be exceptional and to graduate into the banded gneiss, which is interbedded with limestone and other rocks in such a way as to forbid us to assign to the whole a purely eruptive origin. We sometimes call such rocks bedded granites, or granite- gneisses, to distinguish them from those granites which are distinctly intrud- ed at a later time, and in a plastic state, among the strata where they are found. The infelicity of the nomenclature matches pretty exactly the com- plexity of the subject.
Across Goshen, Williamsburg and Westhampton, a great portion of the sur- face is taken up by desolate areas of a coarse granite, consisting uniformly of quartz, orthoclase and muscovite, with rarely a little tourmaline.
In some smaller and yet massive dykes of the same rock, further west, in Chesterfield, Goshen and Huntington, are subordinate portions of abnormal constitution chemically, and, as a result, also mineralogically. These contain albite, var cleavelandite, tourmaline, vars indicolite, and rubellite, spodumene, columbite, cassiterite, zircon, microlite, beryl, tryphyllite and uranite, a most interesting association of rare minerals, which have for many years made " Clark's Ledge," the " Barras farm " and Norwich Hill places well known to mineralogists everywhere.
The Syenite .- Occupying the southwestern quarter of Belchertown is a great rounded mass of a dark eruptive rock, called syenite by President Hitchcock, which was originally a diallage granite that has now by the change of the diallage into hornblende and on into biotite come to be largely a horn- blende biotite granite. It is a rather coarse, granular, dark-grey, or at times slightly amethystine rock. Under the microscope the change of the diallage to hornblende and biotite can be very clearly traced. Its contact phenom- ena-the changes it has wrought in the surrounding rocks with which it came in contact-are of the most interesting description.
The mica schist, the newest rock of the series described above, contains everywhere a small amount of fibrolite of the exceeding fine fibrous variety, but as it comes in contact with the syenite and sends a projection far out into the eruptive rock-from which large fragments are wholly separated and float in the once molten mass-it becomes a coarsely crystalline fibrolite schist, abounding in large crystals of garnet and fibrolite. The fire stone be- low is changed into a compact quartzite, the hornblende schist into a coarse pyroxenite, and in one case, where a large mass of the schist is wholly en- closed in the syenite, into a very coarse biotite-pyroxene rock.
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
On the west side of the valley, bordering the lake terrace, from Elizabeth rock in Northampton north through Hatfield, where it is called " The Rocks," is a broad, barren ridge of the same rocks, which, in the next town to the north, has greatly altered the argillite, a rock which is newer than any in the crystalline series we have described. This shows that the syenite is newer than the crystalline series.
These two great outcrops of eruptive rock stretch, one along the eastern and one along the western border of the broad Connecticut valley, and along the rest of these borders extend lines, or rather narrow bands, of crooked and faulted rocks impregnated with silica and hematite, which seem to mark two lines of fault within which the crystalline rocks sank down to form the deep valley.
MINERAL VEINS.
At Loudville and in Hatfield are interesting veins of quartz and barite, carrying galena, zinc blende, copper and iron pyrites. The gangue was at first largely fluor and calcite, especially at Loudville, but the fissure seems to have been opened a second time, and to have been a channel for the passage of heated waters, by which this earlier gangue was removed and replaced by quartz, often in pseudomorphs, after calcite and fluor, which are now scarcely found in the vein. At Loudville, as products of surface change in a third period, many rare minerals occur, as cerusite, pyromorphite, wulfenite, stolzite and cotunnite.
The middle period of chemical activity in the vein mentioned above may have occurred during the period of volcanic activity, in the Triassic period, or when the final tilting of the sandstone took place, as similar mineral veins occur in the sandstone at Turner's Falls.
THE TRIAS.
If one will picture the broad valley from Pelham across to Westhampton as a half-mile deeper than the present river and imagine the rocky surface of the uplands as a half-mile higher than now, with the canal-like channel filled by the fjord waters to a height above the level of Mt. Holyoke, while the bordering streams swept sand and gravel into the basin and strong currents spread the material over its bottom, he will have a rude outline of Triassic times in the valley. A long list of animals now extinct and often extremely large ; reptiles, amphibians, fishes, crustaceans and insects left their tracks upon the forming sand flats, and these, hardened in the stone, have been recovered and described in a volume which, with the great collections of the remains themselves, is one of the many monuments to the labor and genius of Presi- dent Hitchcock.
Coarse sands from the granites of the west and the gneisses of the east were for a long time swept into the basin, filling it to a thickness of above half a mile
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
certainly, and how much more I do not know. The Belden artesian well, at Northampton, is sunk wholly in these lower sandstones to a depth of over 3,000 feet. Then came the eruption of an enormous sheet of lava, which I imagine came from a fissure parallel to and about a mile southeast of the crest of the Holyoke-Tom range. It is the eroded edge of this sheet which, canted up a little by a subsequent disturbance, makes the crest of the above range.
The deposition of the coarse granitic sands continued for a time after this overflow, and covered the great bed; and then came a second period of more explosive volcanic activity, which spread a great quantity of volcanic ashes and bombs across the bottom of the basin, followed by additional de- position of sand, now finer, and of deep red color from the abundant iron derived from the volcanic dust. These ashes made what we call a volcanic ash or tufa bed, and being tipped up a little with the trap or lava bed of the Holyoke range and much eroded, its outcrop now makes a band along the southeast foot of the mountain, about a mile from its crest, extending from Belchertown to Holyoke.
There followed a third period of volcanic activity, by which a row of small craters opened along the earlier fissure and formed a line of small volcanoes, approximately coincident with the present outcrop of the tufa bed given above. Only the roots of these volcanoes are now preserved, as rounded plugs of lava in the sandstone, two in Belchertown, one far southeast of the east end of the Holyoke range, three in Granby, two in South Hadley, of which the westernmost is of exceptional size and its uncovered portion seems to have expanded beneath the superincumbent sandstones as a true laccolite, and one, finally, across the river in Northampton, north of Smith's Ferry.
The deposition of sand continued, and a series of travertine depositing springs marked the close of the volcanic activity, and formed a quite con- tinuous stratum of limestone in the later sandstones.
The lava, called diabase, dolerite and basalt by different authors with different opinions, we may still conveniently call trap. It is a basic lava, made up of plagioclose, augite and magnetite, a little olivene and glass, and uniformly containing a green chloritic mineral (delessite) as a result of decompo- sition. Percolating waters have taken up the results of decomposition and deposited them in fine crystals in cavities and fissures in the rock, and when fresh exposures occur, as at the railroad excavations at Cheapside, in Deer- field, many rare and beautiful minerals (zeolites) are found. The great bed of lava of the Holyoke range is compact and fine-grained below, and has baked the sandstones on which it rests, and is porous from escaping gases above, while the volcanic plugs are compact in every part and bake the sand- stones everywhere at their contact.
The percolating waters cemented the sands to sandstones, while on the recession of the waters of the fjord the streams from either side ran out over the abandoned bottom of the bay and gathered in a main trunk, which ran
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HAMPSHIRE COUNTY.
down the middle of the basin to the south and commenced to lower the sur- face of the sandstones by erosion. This surface was then above the level of the Holyoke range, and the trap bed was wholly concealed beneath. The course of the ancient Connecticut being thus determined by the contour of the fjord bottom, it cut lower and lower, and in time exposed and cut down through the trap sheet, forming the notch through which the present Connecti- cut flows, while the more rapid erosion of the sandstones carved out the Hol- yoke-Mt. Tom range.
Of the long period occupied by this erosion, rich in event as it was else- where, no abiding record was made in the valley ; but at the approach of the ice period the surface of the valley nad about its present contour, only over the uplands there were rounded surfaces of deeply-rotted granites and gneisses, and in the valley the sandstone surface north of the Holyoke range was, I surmise, about as high as it is south of the mountain at present, that is, two or three hundred feet above the meadows.
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