USA > Massachusetts > Essex County > The story of Essex County, Volume I > Part 3
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However much or little rain might fall during the retreat of the continental ice-cap as the Glacial Period drew to an end, that much or little was considerably augmented by waters from the melting ice. Floods, therefore, tended to be high. But the land at the same time stood so low that the sea came up the Merrimac Valley to Manches- ter. Much of Essex County was a group of islands cut off from North America by the flooded valley that the Merrimac was then occupying from Lowell across Middlesex to Boston Harbor. Great Bay then stretched from Rochester, New Hampshire, almost to the city blocks of Haverhill.
These flooded streams as the ice-cap was melting off, worked over, sorted out, and transported down river vast quantities of the unassorted till which the ice had dumped down over the land. With the land standing low and all the larger valleys arms of the sea, much of this washed-over till was redeposited under water. The result is the so-called washed drift which almost everywhere in the valleys overlies the till and the hard rocks up to about the hundred-foot level.
Always this is a characteristic water deposit. It may be coarse gravel or fine gravel or sand or silt or clay. But it is never, as the till is, a mixture of all; and the pebbles of the gravels and the larger stones are rounded and water-worn. It is, in short, like other water- formed deposits. It is glacial drift only because ice first transported the material before water took it in hand.
Inevitably, this washed drift takes on different forms as the water which dropped it was swift-flowing or at rest, a river or an arm of the sea.
Its simplest form, topographically, is the sand-plain or outwash plain, such for example, as that on which Lawrence is for the most part built.
Such sand-plains are nearly level, though they may be somewhat cut up by stream valleys. The material is sand or silt, commonly rather uniform, and the surface somewhat commonly slopes toward the south. Commonly also the sand-plains fill, wholly or in part, low
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GEOLOGIC HISTORY
spots in the hard rocks or the till. Often they suggest the bottoms of ponds that have been silted up.
Occasionally, these sand-plains become veritable stream deltas; delta-plains, as they are called. One such at Ballardvale, a mile each way, has a nearly flat top, characteristic delta lobes at its southern end, the material becoming finer from north to south. It stands sixty feet above the present river, which flows north. The river that built the delta obviously flowed south.
Ofttimes what are essentially partial deltas, instead of forming against the sides of a stream valley or against a lake shore, built up against tongues of stagnant ice that occupied the middle of the val- leys with some interval between the ice and the valley wall. Into this interval, washed sand and gravel, carried not uncommonly by rapid and variable currents. The ice tongue being now gone, the result is a type of kame, that is a sand or gravel bench, more or less continuous along the valley side. Any type of sand-plain makes a site for a race track.
But these stagnant ice tongues quite often broke up into separate blocks with flowing water between. The water brought in the usual sand and gravel. The ice blocks are now departed. The result is a most extraordinary and picturesque kame-and-kettle-hole topography. It looks like a terminal moraine-there are, indeed, "kame moraines" at the sides of ice tongues. But the material is gravel and sand, not till; the elevations tend all to reach the same level; there are no large boulders either inside the hills or on their surface, and consequently no stone walls. Such patches are favorite spots for graveyards. An uncommonly good example, graveyards and all, lies on the east side of the Shawsheen River, between the railway station and Ballardvale.
These kettle-holes have no outlets, being merely places where a delta did not form because ice was there. The smallest of them, a few hundred yards across, are likely to be damp or swampy at the bottom. The deeper ones, and the larger up to about a mile across, contain ponds. In fact, nearly all the little ponds of the district are in large kettle-holes. Such ponds are nearly round, shallow, with a complete sand rim.
Ponds larger than a mile across, and many smaller than this as well, occupy old stream valleys that are blocked by washed drift. These may be deep, with the shores coming down somewhat steeply to
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
the water from nearby hills of till or rock. But one portion of the shore is different from the rest-the dam of washed drift that blocks the ancient valley. Great Pond in North Andover and Johnson's Pond in Groveland are of this type. But the ancient Merrimac, blocked by washed drift south of Lowell, instead of forming a lake, returning quite possibly to its old valley, turned off across the Mer- rimac quartzite in a series of falls. All the lakes and ponds and swamps of New England result from blocking the pre-glacial drainage by glacial drift. Washed drift rather than till commonly accounts for the lakes and ponds.
One type of washed drift there is which is not related to deltas, the esker or serpent kame. Even a modern valley glacier, when the ice is melting, develops a considerable stream system on its surface; and these surface waters, falling through the crevasses, form a system of channels at the bottom of the ice. Naturally, like all streams, such under-ice rivers deposit sand and gravel. But being in confined pipes and under pressure, their currents are violent and they transport larger boulders than open-air streams outside of mountains.
Such under-ice deposits, on a large scale, survive from the Ice Age. Sometimes they are sand; more often they are gravel. Because of the head of water behind the stream, boulders in the gravel may be as large as one's head. Because they ran in under-ice tunnels, they are tortuous and irregular, with small relation to the local slope of the ground. But sometimes they are straight enough for a quarter- mile to look like a railway fill. In general, such eskers lie above other deposits. Sometimes the deltas have buried them. Indian ridges is their local name.
An under-ice drainage system, marked by such Indian ridges, begins near Manchester, New Hampshire, crosses the Merrimac at Lawrence, follows the main highway to Shawsheen village and then the Shawsheen River, for the most part on the west side, to the delta at Ballardvale. Not uncommonly, in fact, does an esker, formed beneath the ice, merge with a delta built against its southern end. This Manchester-Andover esker is classic ground: George Frederic Wright, then pastor at Andover, described it in a paper before the Boston Society of Natural History in 1876.
Further east another such esker system enters the county at Mer- rimac, and passing almost straight south, picks up at Groveland an
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GEOLOGIC HISTORY
important tributary that has come down from the northwest through Haverhill and followed the south bank of the river from Bradford. From Groveland the esker is fairly straight to Boxford Station on the Newburyport Branch of the Boston and Maine Railway, which it passes just to the east. Thereafter its course becomes erratic; it winds an uncertain way, picking up tributaries as it goes, through Hamilton and Wenham to Beverly and the sea. There is also a branch through Linebrook, with many an islolated patch besides, for a subglacial river no more deposits gravel everywhere in its course than a modern river does. Especially toward its southern end the components of the esker system separate and reunite, are interrupted and reappear. But always the narrow, steep-sided ridge, the water- rounded pebbles and boulders, once seen, are not to be mistaken.
Such eskers suggest terminal moraines. But they are gravel, not till, and they trend north and south instead of east and west; down the general slope, not across it. But the portion of a moraine which lies at the side of an ice tongue is hardly to be distinguished from esker and kame. In fact, on Cape Ann a serpent kame lies right across the moraine.
Some of the best farm land of New England is in the river bot- toms and on the terraces and floodplains of the larger streams, deposits which though late Pleistocene in age are not strictly glacial.
With the land standing low and the rivers running high, with unlimited supplies of ice-ground rock lying ready for the streams to carry off, it was inevitable that most valleys had their bottoms more or less filled in by ordinary river silt that is remarkable only for its amount. Such deposits, virtually level on the upper surface, may be a hundred feet or more thick and continue a score of miles up and down stream.
This river silt, in the smaller valleys, remains a good deal as it was laid down, except that as the land has risen the river has cut down its channel and now flows a score or more feet below its former level. The larger streams, swinging back and forth as they cut down through the silt, formed terraces at their sides, so that the land surface now is at several different elevations. The Merrimac above Lowell shows such terraces to perfection. But through Essex County the Merrimac has no proper valley.
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Courtesy of The Essex Institute
MAGNOLIA-UNDER THE PINES
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GEOLOGIC HISTORY
If these floodplains were at the flood level, as floodplains com- monly are, and as the more recent ones are still, they would be too wet for gardening. But the land hereabouts has come up just enough to drain them nicely. The river silt is highly fertile when not too sandy. The surfaces are level. There are no rocks. They are, in short, little glacial prairies set among the granite hills.
Glacial clays are much like other clays, not characteristic in their form as are kames and eskers or old deltas high and dry on the hill- sides. The clays of Essex County are virtually all glacial.
These clays are abundant, well distributed, and accessible. In fact, from early Colonial days, the region has been a center both for brickmaking and for pottery. Nearly every town and village in the county has at some time made bricks, the output for the whole county sometimes reaching twenty millions a year. A half-dozen towns have manufactured earthenware.
Some of the clay beds are a hundred feet thick. A typical arrange- ment has marine clay at the bottom, overlain by gravel or sand. Above the sand come fresh-water clays; covering all is another sand layer and the surface soil. The clay rests on bed rock or on till. It belongs to the closing stages of the Ice Age; and is, apparently, always younger than the drumlins.
Marine clays are commonly unstratified, for fine particles and not so fine sink about equally in salt water. But fresh water tends to sort out its sediments. Therefore, during the winters, when the glacial ice was not melting and the glacial streams were low, the deposits on lake floors was very fine clay. But during the summer, when the ice was melting freely and the streams were high, the lake-floor deposits ran more to sand. The result is an annual banding in fresh-water glacial clays, with layers from an inch or two thick up to several feet, that can be counted like the growth rings in temperate climate trees.
In Scandinavia, where they still have glaciers, and where rising land is bringing under-water deposits up where they can be seen, much study has been given, during the present century, to these "varve" clays, both to those of glacial age and those forming now. Intervals of late glacial time and periods since, up to historic times, can now be counted off with an error of only a year or two to the century.
The same sort of studies are now being carried forward in this country, especially in the Hudson and Connecticut Valleys, and in the
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
Merrimac Valley above Manchester where, in late glacial times, there was a winding fresh-water lake more than fifty miles long, between Plymouth and what was then the sea. The varves along the lower Merrimac have still to be dealt with. But the abundant clays of Essex County make that a promising field. Here, then, is one of the things to be looked for. If all goes well, we shall shortly be able to map the ice front for each century of its retreat across Northeastern Massachusetts, date and correlate all the patches of terminal moraine, time each readvance of the ice and each mile of its retreat, and know the swings of climate back and forth even to single hot or cold summers.
Essex County has altered little since the ice left North America. Soil has formed on the glacial drift-and very thin and poor some of it is on the kames and eskers. The drift is gullied here and there. But there is little run-off on sand and gravel; and the drumlins seem to have grown sod before the clay had time to wash. The borders of some ponds have become swamps. There are peat bogs in nearly every town, with the peat sometimes ten feet thick. The Merrimac is forming an interesting delta at its new mouth. There has been some weathering of the rocks. Bog iron still forms in the swamps, no longer as in Colonial times an important ore. This, inland, is about all that has occurred.
The coast has altered more. Ten thousand years of battering by great waves has broken even the Paleozoic granites; headlands and beaches are all new. New, also, are the chasms where the sea and the weather have cut out the dikes, and new in general is all the detail of the shore.
The greatest change has come where the glacial drift touches the sea. Till resists the ocean feebly; sand and gravel hardly at all. The waves cut rapidly into both. The fine material becomes off-shore mud- flats; the sand and gravel become beaches.
But the currents along the New England coast, on the whole run south. The sand, therefore, as the waves stir it up, tends to settle a little further along, and all the beaches from Portland down are mov- ing toward Boston. So we have Salisbury Beach and Plum Island and Castle Neck and Coffin's Beach all really a single twenty-mile strand, all built of material that has crept along the coast from further north and all visibly growing southward. But the smaller pocket beaches
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GEOLOGIC HISTORY
from Cape Ann south are built from fragments of neighboring head- lands which the waves have knocked apart.
The waves, especially in the storms, throw the beach sand well above the ordinary high-tide mark. There it dries. Then the wind catches it and piles it into dunes, forty and sixty feet high, a veritable desert of white sand, scantily covered in its older parts by coarse grass and other herbs, with an occasional tree. The dunes keep shifting with the wind. At least one farm on Plum Island and another on Castle Neck have been overwhelmed and destroyed. From time to time, as the dunes migrate, are exposed the roots of old drumlins that have worn down to sea level to become beach sand and more dunes. Steep Hill on Castle Neck, its flanks cut into by the waves, exhibits to per- fection this process of converting drumlin into dune.
Nowhere short of Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod is there such a dune country as borders Essex County. Nowhere, not even on the Great Moraine, is there anything so wholly unlike our familiar landscape as these two wind-blown and wind-created deserts.
Inside the barrier beaches, of which Plum Island is the longest, between the dunes and the old rock country, lie remarkable salt marshes, sometimes three and four miles wide. The marsh which borders Parker River, behind Plum Island, goes inland ten miles from the sea.
These salt marshes have been interpreted as evidence of a sinking coast. Be that as it may, the marshes are now slowly building up from the remains of dead plants, the wash of the sea, the dust blown from inland and the dunes, and especially from the silt of the rivers that is forming vague deltas at the stream mouths. Some day, if the coast does not go down too fast, all this marsh country will be dry land.
In general, then, to sum up in paragraphs the story of twice two hundred million years, the hard rocks of Essex County are largely of Paleozoic age, mostly late Paleozoic at that. They were crushed and folded when the Appalachians were elevated at the end of the Paleo- zoic, and became a lofty mountain range. This mountain range wore down with time. Out of its roots, between the coming of the great reptiles and the onset of the Ice Age, were carved all the larger fea- tures of the present-day landscape, with Essex County a hundred miles inland.
The continental glacier, dumping down the load of drift which it brought from the higher country northwest, on the whole smoothed
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
out the Essex topography. But it heaped up nearly two hundred drumlins that are commonly higher than the original rock hills. Before the drift came, there were no lakes, ponds, or swamps at all comparable to those now.
Thus was Essex County and the district around it made ready for the history which follows.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES-The standard authority on all that concerns the geology of Essex County is :
John Henry Sears: "The Physical Geography, Geology, Min- eralogy, and Paleontology of Essex County, Massachusetts." The Essex Institute, Salem, 1905. Pp. 411; 209 illustrations; geologic map.
The volume is out of print but generally accessible at libraries. The illustrations are admirable and the descriptions accurate and minute. The information, especially on theoretical matters and on paleontology, is somewhat out of date and the author's names for the local formations are superseded.
A more technical account of the district appears in :
B. K. Emerson: "Geology of Massachusetts and Rhode Island." United States Geological Survey Bulletin 597, Government Printing Office, 1917. Pp. 277; 10 plates; large, colored geological map.
This in turn may be supplemented by :
Laurence LaForge, "Geology of the Boston Area, Massachu- setts." United States Geological Survey Bulletin 839. Government Printing Office, 1932. Pp. 93; 15 plates, text figures; two colored geological maps. Although this Bulletin deals especially with the dis- trict immediately south of Essex County, much of its information extends north. Moreover, the history of the two regions has been substantially identical. Especially valuable is a seven-page bibliog- raphy, complete for all Northeastern Massachusetts.
The geologic history of Essex County has been so nearly identical with that of the larger district of which it is a part that almost any work dealing with Southern New England helps to explain the lesser area. Especially to be commended is :
James Walter Goldthwait: "The Geology of New Hampshire." New Hampshire Academy of Science, Handbook No. 1; Rumford Press, Concord, New Hampshire, 1925. Pp. 74; 27 plates, 21 text
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GEOLOGIC HISTORY
figures; two maps. This also has an admirable bibliography of six pages.
Since glaciers and ice-caps are much the same the world over, the Ice Age deposits of Essex County are well covered by general works, including the larger textbooks. Local detail appears in :
Ernst Antevs: "The Recession of the Last Ice Sheet in New England." American Geographical Society, text figures and dia- grams; map showing all terminal and recessional moraines east of Lake Erie. Six-page bibliography.
Ernst Antevs: "The Last Glaciation, with Special Reference to the Ice Retreat in Northeastern North America." Idem, 1928. Pp. 243. Bibliography, 38 pp.
George Frederic Wright, D. D., described the Manchester- Andover esker in the "Bulletin of the Essex Institute," Salem, 1875, and again in 1876 in the "Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natu- ral History."
F. S. Mills, of Andover, described the delta-plain at Ballardvale in the "American Geologist" for September, 1903.
For the post-glacial history of the district :
Douglas Wilson Johnson: "The New England-Acadian Shore Line," New York, 1925. Pp. 608; illustrations, plates, maps, dia- grams. Bibliography at end of each chapter.
On the United States Geological Survey's Topographical Map, Essex County is covered by the Haverhill, Lawrence, Boston, New- buryport, Salem, Boston Bay, and Gloucester sheets, Numbers 29, 30. 31, 36, 37, 38, and 43. These are on sale at the State House in Bos- ton and at many bookstores at fifteen cents each.
Essex County In Indian Times
Essex-3
CHAPTER II
1140283
Essex County In Indian Times
By Dr. Warren King Moorehead and Scott H. Paradise.
Indians were our first citizens, not merely in New England, but, for that matter, throughout both Americas. While they differed in language, customs, and government from the white Europeans who displaced them and took over their possessions, it is scarcely fair to call them savages. Rather should we designate them as men and women often swayed by impulses and emotions such as governed our own white ancestors in Western Europe three thousand years ago. In 1620 our Indians were in the neolithic stone age. This fact and all that it implies has been overlooked by many of our writers.
Our two chapters upon Indians of this region do not pretend to contain much original material. Rather is our task a summary of what has been previously published. There is a marked tendency today on the part of historical writers to treat our Indians sympathetically, to understand more perfectly the Indian mind. Two works recently published emphasize this trend and are illustrative of the change of sentiment concerning our red race here in New England. They are Clara Endicott Sears's "The Great Powwow" and Allan Forbes's "Some Indian Events of New England."
Now that three centuries have passed since we became the domi- nant race in New England, we are able to free our minds from the idea prevalent in Colonial literature that all Indians were brutal and cruel, and that warfare was their chief occupation. It is time to pre- sent, in so far as possible, the Indian point of view of relations between the superior white race and New England's original inhabi- tants. Herbert Milton Sylvester, in his "Indian Wars of New Eng- land," has been able to disassociate himself from the traditional white
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THE STORY OF ESSEX COUNTY
man's point of view, to look with sympathy upon the wrongs of the savage, and to see with an unprejudiced view the conduct of the early settlers.
The character of the Indian was molded by his environment, by the forests in which he lived.
"Whatever of kindly virtues he possessed were the simple gifts of nature. Whatever of haughty stoicism and ineptitude of speech, by which he was able to most successfully conceal his emotions, were the natural expression of a nature which had been molded in difficulties and amid privations-a nature whose traits were those of a stern, yet simple and enduring purpose."1
Yet "to the Englishman the Indian had no rights . . . . he was a degenerate, viciously corrupt," and he who had once held undis- puted rule over the lands of his ancestors found himself, at the hands of the English, deprived of them, driven into exile, and frequently sold into slavery. The Puritan with his trading instinct, his arrogant sense of superiority over the simple native, his ability to find Biblical sanction whenever convenient to justify his acts, and his superior arms and organization, brought inevitable doom to the Indian. The English took what land they wanted on the seashore, on the river banks, and among the meadows. When they deigned to "purchase" it, they closed the bargain with men who had no knowledge of writ- ten contracts and no conception of private ownership of soil, and the price they paid was ludicrous-a mere pretence. The township of Andover was bought for six pounds, currency, and a coat from the sachem Cutshamache, whose right to dispose of the land was in any case doubtful and of whom the "History of Dorchester" says : "This chief appears to have been a mere tool in the hands of the colonial government, used for the purpose of deeding away Indian lands and acting as a spy upon the movements of neighboring tribes."2 Poquanum, Sachem of Nahant, was given a suit of clothes in pay- ment for that beautiful territory, and in this case, too, it was later determined that he had no title to the peninsula in the first place.
I. The above quotation and those immediately following are from "The Indian Wars of New England," by Herbert Milton Sylvester, Boston, 1910. Chapter II, passim.
2. Quoted by Sarah Loring Bailey, in "Historical Sketches of Andover," Boston 1880, p. 163.
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ESSEX COUNTY IN INDIAN TIMES
The township of Manchester was bought for the sum of three pounds, nineteen shillings current silver money of New England. Bradford cost the white man £6 12s. and Ipswich £20. Though Governor Cradock wrote Endicott as early as 1629: "Be not unmindful of the main end of our Plantation, by endeavoring to bring the Indians to a knowledge of the Gospel," and urged him to be just and courteous to the natives to win their affection and their good opinion, it was not long before the Puritan was waging implacable war upon the red man and through treachery and inhumanity striving for his complete extermination. The General Court offered a bounty for Indian scalps, irrespective of sex or age, and the Reverend Solomon Stod- dard made the Christian suggestion that the Indians be hunted down with dogs, "as they doe bears." To make the Indians' situation still more hopeless, the great plague had fallen upon them ( 1616-17) just before the arrival of the English. From Canada to Long Island Sound the tribes were grievously stricken and reduced to a small frac- tion of their former numbers. Once powerful groups were nearly wiped out, and the morale of the few survivors must have been shat- tered. Had it not been for this affliction, the red man could easily and perhaps would have driven the English into the sea.
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