History of the city of Nashua, N.H., Part 17

Author: Parker, Edward Everett, 1842- ed; Reinheimer, H., & Co
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Nashua, N.H., Telegraph Publishing Company
Number of Pages: 652

USA > New Hampshire > Hillsborough County > Nashua > History of the city of Nashua, N.H. > Part 17

Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).

If we go up Kinsley street nearly to the height of land southwest of the cemetery, we shall find that the excavation made for the street has been deepened and extended a little at the north of the travelled portion of the highway, leaving exposed several square yards of the surface of the granite bed-rock. The contour of the rock seems to correspond with that of the top of the ground eight or ten feet above it, and the surface of the granite, instead of being rough and angular as one might expect to find it, is on the contrary worn down smooth and polished. This surface is not quite plane, however, and on close examination, certain parallel grooves and streaks, varying in width and depth, and not following the line of cleavage, will be observed. These striæ have a southerly direction and are not all continuous. One may begin quite wide and deep, gradually grow smaller and then perhaps suddenly end. They never waver in direction, however, and never cross each other. The hand that held the graver was very firm indeed. . Some of the marks and scorings are mere scratches, others are broad and deep. A few years of exposure of this crystaline rock in the open air, subjected to heat and cold, to rain and frost, will obliterate all the finer lines, and change its glittering surface to a dull and crumbling gray covered with lichens. Then only the larger and deeper grooves will remain. Hence we shall have more difficulty in finding the marks for which we are seeking upon rocks which have been for years exposed to the weather.

Now if we cross the Hollis road and the railroad, and visit the extensive quarry of the Nashua Manufacturing company, and are fortunate enough to find any of the rock undisturbed, from which the earth has been removed, we shall discover the same phenomena. The rock is polished, the grooves vary in size, are parallel and run in a southerly direction.

Across the valley two or three miles, on the other side of the Merrimack in Hudson, lying east of the Catholic cemetery, are a number of quarries, about which the uncovered bed rock, when swept

HISTORY OF NASIIUA, N. H.

clean of the soil, afford many fine illustrations of this polished work, with parallel groove sand markings all pointing toward the south. When once one has learned to recognize and distinguish the marks indicated, he will easily find many more examples of the same in this vicinity both upon rocks that have been newly uncovered and upon those for a long time weathered. In fact if all the stones, sand, gravel and clay were removed from the bed rock anywhere north of this latitude in New England, and the rock floor of the country laid bare, we should find nearly every square rod of the surface smoothed and polished, grooved and striated precisely as we find the spots I have mentioned.

Looking toward Nashua from the Uncanoonucs, one sees a succession of hills growing less in the distance; some of them are knobs of rock, from which the earth has for the most part disappeared, allowing us to discern their contour. We find the ascent of these prominences from the north to be gradual and easy, while their southern declivities are frequently abrupt and precipitous. This is notably the case with Joe English. This peculiarity is also quite obvious to any person who will take the trouble to visit the rocky hill about four miles north of Nashua, just west of the Manchester road, in the southern part of Merrimack. This hill is of a clay slate formation extending from northeast to southwest, and on top is mostly bare with here and there long stretches of moss interspersed with patches of thin soil. On the northern acclivity, though much weathered, broad shallow grooves can be traced for rods, and on that side the hill is rasped and rounded off as though some vast and ponderous force had slowly ploughed and ground its way up the ascent, overcoming every obstacle, cutting off every projection, and wearing down every angle; on the southern face of the hill it is evident the solid rock could not stand the immense pressure from the north, and, with nothing to back it up on the south, it yielded to the enormous weight, cracked into huge blocks, which being crowded out, toppled over the precipice and lay at its foot in detached masses, or were borne slowly away toward the south by the same irresistible force that tore them from the fastness of the solid rock. This obscure Merrimack ledge, within an easy morning's walk of our firesides, will tell us, if we will but interrogate it sharply, the story of Winter hill and Long hill in Nashua and nearly every mountain and hill and surface rock in situ in New England. The rock in the pasture upon which as boys we used to play and upon the southern extremity of which we used to sit and let our feet hang down the steep sides, is a true roche moutonee, well smoothed and graded on its northern side, broken and precipitous on the south, where perhaps at the foot it has sheltered us when the north wind blew too cold. If we go now and look at the old friend of our childhood we shall find parallel grooves along its sides as though made by the chariot wheels of the great northern god of force, the Scandinavian Thor, as he drove over its surface with even reins, veering neither to the right or left.

This Merrimack witness tells us that before New Hampshire ever went through a period of glaciation, her hills lacked the soft curves and rounded outlines which we see to-day, and that formerly their summits were like the roofs and pinnacles of a great cathedral towering thousands of feet further toward the sky ; that Francestown may have been the Jungfrau, Lyndeboro the Matterhorn, and Monadnock the Mont Blanc of our southern New Hampshire Alps, while sixty miles away across the Connecticut, the Green mountain range may have formed the Jura of this New England Switzerland. How many beautiful lakes lay shimmering between we may never know, for on that subject our witness is silent. But he tells us that every lofty mountain pinnacle was toppled over, every high peak and dizzy ridge broken off and ground down and covered over with a vast depth of snow, which coming more and more of it every winter, refused to go away in summer, but congealed into ice and grew deeper and deeper until-Mt. Washington tells us-it was more than a mile thick, and it began to move southerly and southeasterly in the line of the least resistance out over the floor of the Atlantic ocean, and when it reached the vicinity of George's Banks and Newfoundland, assailed by the sun and the sea, to break off into great icebergs and float away just as the ice is now doing from the Humboldt glacier, a degree of latitude in width on the coast of Greenland.

Indeed, the interior of Greenland now is not unlike this country from Long Island to Labrador during the great ice age. Mr. Edward Whymper, who ascended some of the high elevations near the coast of Greenland, finds the surface of the inland ice rough and broken into crevasses and seracs of gigantic dimensions, and the heart of that frozen land covered with ice which he estimated to be from five to ten miles in thickness. By the side of such a great expanse of ice the Alpine Mer de Glace is like a rippling brook by the side of the stormy sea.

HISTORY OF NASHUA, N. H.

During the ice age all New England, and with it all the northern part of this continent, was a scene of desolation and Arctic solitude. No form of organic life was possible ; death reigned supreme and the ice like a shroud covered the whole land. This lasted many years. The approach of the continental glacier was doubtless slow, and to the rude inhabitants, who may have dwelt in this land, imperceptible. Perhaps some aged chieftain, when, after long years, he returned to the snowy regions with his savage tribe in pursuit of the shaggy elephant or polar bear, may have failed to discover the crystal lake he had known as a boy, or the dark cedar forest which had been the hunting-ground of his youth, yet, if such were the case, he may never have dreamed of the cause, and may have charged his lack of success to the failing faculties of old age. Ever longer and more severe grew the winters, shorter and colder the summers. Arctic storms usurped the region of summer breezes and the dweller by the glacier's southern edge unconsciously followed his game and found his home farther to the south on each recurring spring. As even now-so little do we frequent the arctic regions-if the ice of Greenland were slowly approaching the sea line, proposing by and by to cross the straits on the sea bottom to the main land, we should hardly be aware of it, unless we were able to compare the condition of things there to-day with what it was a thousand years ago. Then we might learn that where once were green and fertile fields now is found the perennial glacier, where, placed on dry land, were the foundations of an ancient building now the waves of the sea have arisen and stay as if eager to meet their kindred in the glacier from which so long ago they parted company. If the writer understands the significance of the phenomena observed on the coast of Greenland another ice age has begun and already in that region the ice fields have become so thick and heavy as to change a few feet the earth's centre of gravity, bringing the water up on the coast, just as a heavy weight on the side of a boat causes the water to appear to rise on that side.

Geologists say a similar displacement of the Atlantic coast has occurred before, beginning in the vicinity of New York and growing deeper toward the north until on the coast of Greenland the water rose a thousand feet. We have not far to go for the cause when we consider the continental ice-cap of the last great ice age. That extended south to the vicinity of New York. A few years ago before a learned society in Philadelphia, a young man from this vicinity who had assisted in the geological survey of this state, Warren Upham, delighted his audience by tracing the great terminal moraine of that continental glacier from the Banks to Cape Cod, Nantucket, Long Island, through New Jersey and into Pennsylvania. Since then Professor Wright of Oberlin traced the extreme southern limit of the ice cap to the Ohio river near Cincinnati and beyond, and later Mr. Chamberlin, of the U. S. Geological survey, and the state geologists of some western states have followed the moraine across the Mississippi and onward to the Rocky mountains. The displacement caused by the weight of ice might well cause the apparent rise of the ocean level along our coast and cause that rise to appear greatest on that parallel where the ice lay deepest, terminating on the parallel where the ice cap terminated. If this depression of the continent took place as the geologists affirm and of which the writer knows nothing from observation, then the land must have been well protected by its armor of ice more than mountain high, for I have never been able to find inland along our coast or in the interior any indication of the action of ocean waves and tides against hills and rocks.

As may have been noticed, our Merrimack witness also discloses the origin of the bowlders called- when away from the parent rock-"lost children," "foundlings," "wanderers" and "glacial tramps." At the foot of the crag where they fell when pressed off by the great weight of moving ice above, they are merely detached rocks; carried for even a short distance in or under the ice the sharpest angles are rubbed off and they become bowlders; carried still further they lose their angular shape altogether, and, unless they still retain a considerable size, they become merely rounded pebbles, worn and smoothed by attrition against each other. In the high lands and in the hard-pan hills where the bowlders have been left undisturbed since the retreat of the continental glacier, the bowlders as well as the bed-rock show plainly the glacial grooving and striæe. Bowlders of slate receive and retain these glacial marks better perhaps than any others. For obvious reasons these scorings and marks are seldom found on small bowlders of crystalline rock or on bowlders which have been moved from their beds in the hard-pan, either by sub-glacial or post-glacial streams of water, and hence they are not of frequent occurrence in the Nashua drift.

The word drift has been used to apply to the clay, sand, gravel and stones, which, here mingled and there separated, lie in apparent and aimless confusion all over the face of the country between the

HISTORY OF NASIIUA, N. H.

bed-rock and the atmosphere. Its location, distribution and varying composition, its division into bowlder, covered hills, terraced valley sides, and broad, sandy plains, all show that it has, much of it, been through some kind of a sorting process, and such changes and transportations as naturally lead us to inquire : What was the original source and condition of the drift ? What has moved and sorted and changed it, and how-and relatively, when-did it assume its present shape and form ?

Many a good geologist has been all at sea in regard to the distribution of the drift and has seen in it only a confused and disorderly jumble, without rhyme or reason in its arrangement; here a hill and there a sand bank, here a clay bed and there a gravel pit, and here again nothing but bowlders and rocks, all the result, apparently, of pure chance. To the unthinking observer there appears to be a great preponderance of drift, but in fact there is comparatively little of it and it constitutes no appreciable part of the earth's diameter. Yet the distribution of this drift was no slight matter, but was in reality one of the greatest works ever done on the earth's surface, whether we reckon the expenditure of energy required or the length of time it took. Eight thousand miles of solid rock or something equally dense ; then, during the ice age, perhaps two miles of solid ice ; on the top of that fifty miles of atmosphere, and beyond that illimitable space at two or three hundred degrees below zero. The drift comes in between the solid rock and the nearly equally solid ice, a thin paste only twenty-five or thirty feet deep on an average over New England, according to Mr. Shaler, made by the grinding of the ice southerly over the rock.

By stepping into a marble worker's shop when he is engaged in polishing a piece of marble or granite we may see something akin to the origin of the drift as he slowly moves one piece over another, keeping a supply of water and fine grit upon the surface, which in time becomes smooth and polished. If, instead of fine sand, gravel is used upon the surface and the upper stone is moved in one direction only, we shall find scratches and grooves upon the lower, very much like glacial striæ on rock slate. The similarity of the process does not end here for the fine flour from the grinding of the two surfaces gives the water a milky appearance as it flows away such as all glacial streams have, and, if allowed to settle undisturbed, it forms a miniature clay bed. Marble is sawed in the same way at the mills, just water, sand and moving strips of smooth, soft iron arranged like saws, and the solid block is soon reduced to thin planes.

In denuding the mountains, excavating the valleys and eroding the lake-beds of New England, the thin strata of paste and bowlders, pebbles, gravel and sand, between the ice and the bed-rock was borne along also with the ice, but perhaps not always with the same velocity. The friction of the immovable rock surface below would serve to retard it and in some instances a projection of peculiarly hard rock, or a very narrow valley across which it moved, may have been the occasion and cause of 1 an accumulation of the material composing this strata.

Such accumulations, which have escaped the modifying effects of the melting of the great continental ice-cap which once covered them, and bore them along beneath its weight are found all over New England. They are generally in the shape of gracefully curved hills of regular outline, having their longest axis in the direction of the movement of the ice. Such hills are found in the south part of Nashua, in Hollis, New Boston, Mont Vernon, Greenville, and Groton and Quincy, Mass., and in Boston Harbor. In building the railroad north from Plymouth toward the Profile house, masses of the same material were found wedged into the valley so solid and close as almost to defy the attempts of the civil engineer.

These hills, sometimes called drumlins, are composed of hard-pan or till, as it is called by the Scottish writers. It is not stratified. The clay and sand, the gravel and pebbles, and bowlders, great and small, are all indiscriminately mixed. The bowlders are as liable to be near the surface as elsewhere. This hard-pan has never been ærated except for a short distance below the surface. When mixed with water it becomes soft and plastic and flows like thin mortar. Though it will hardly yield to the pick-axe or to dynamite, it is easily displaced, removed and sorted by running water. The hard-pan was the original home and storehouse of all the drift of New England. For whatever was here upon the surface before the beginning of the first ice period was carried out into the Atlantic by the ice advance, and it is evident that large portions of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island have been built up and raised above the sea level by the agency of the drift brought down by the northern ice.

HISTORY OF NASHUA, N. H.

These masses of hard-pan which I have attempted to describe are the ground moraine of the ice- cap formed as we have seen beneath its weight on the rock floor of the continent. Sorted and separated by the water, whether in the form of mountain torrents, sub-glacial streams, great rivers or the floods arising from the melting ice, or all combined, the hard-pan has furnished the material for the clay bed, the sand bank and the gravel pit; and although in a certain limited sense the process of separation and deposit is still going on, when the freshets of spring reach the mass of hard-pan and bear away its clay to the ocean or some still lake, and its sands to silt up the slow running streams and ponds below and leave the large bowlders near where they were deposited by the ice, yet it is safe to assume that the chief part of this work of separating the rest of the drift from the hard-pan and depositing it where we find it now was done by the waters from the melting ice at the close of the ice age.

The phenomena of the disappearance and retreat of the continental ice cap and their effects on a given locality have never yet been very fully discussed by any glacialist; so one needs to proceed very carefully on this as yet untrodden ground. Yet here in Nashua within the limits of an easy walk we may derive some light on this interesting subject. It is evident that the great southward moving glacier could not have disappeared at once. Its retreat must have been gradual ; whether at the rate of a few rods, or miles each year, it is hard to determine. There are indications that its general retreat was attended with now and then a short advance. It may be that the phenomena at the southern extremity of the ice sheet were repeated a hundred years later only twenty or thirty miles to the northward.

It is also obvious that there must have come a time over a more or less limited extent when the ice sheet became too thin to keep up its general southerly movement, so thin that it broke on the height of land and shrunk back and in some places taking with it its ground moraine, slid into the valleys, still, however, keeping up a southerly movement in a north and south valley unless such valley was closed by these lateral slides.

For example, when such a time had come here and the ice and accompanying hard pan began to slide from the surface of Long hill easterly into what is now the Merrimack, and from Bush hill in Hudson, westerly into the same receptacle, instead of keeping on its former course south, it is possible that the general southerly course of the ice was still retained twenty miles to the north, so that the tendency was to keep up the movement of the ice stream down the Merrimack valley well defined in width and volume. It was the pattern or cast of which the mould, the Merrimack interval, alone now remains, and that has been nearly half filled up by the sand brought down from the north. Although this ice stream lacked the steep incline of an Alpine glacier yet the movement was kept up by the great pressure of snow and ice not far to the north, say at Amoskeag falls ; a pressure much greater than would be found in the snow-fields of the Alps. Now, if this were the case, then the ice sliding down from Winter hill, for example, at first reached and coalesced with the actual ice stream of the Merrimack on the west, and with that of the Nashua on the south, then subsequently, as the ice melted at the edge and all over its surface as well, these tongues of ice reaching down toward the two ice rivers failed to quite touch them leaving only a narrow hollow between. Then when summer came and water fell in the form of rain instead of snow it would run down the surface of the ice, and, if it found no outlet it would stand in the spaces at the foot of these lateral tongues of ice and the main ice stream of the two river intervals. Anything on the surface of either body of ice, in the shape of sand or gravel or pebbles, washed down their sides and lodged in these open spaces.

Let us examine the vicinity of St. Francis Xavier church on Chandler street. To build Chandler street a high ridge was cut down thirty or forty feet, where the ridge curves from east to north parallel to the Nashua river. The church has been located in the same ridge, a little further to the north and beyond the little curve, in an excavation made for the purpose. If we closely examine the sides of the excavation made for the street we shall see that the hill is made up of layers of gravel and pebbles as large as a man's fist and some small bowlders as large as his head, all well washed and rounded. Here are layers of black pebbles sloping southerly toward the Nashua river and two or three feet in thickness. That kind of stone is found in its native rock north of Shattuck's ledge toward Merri- mack. The ice on which these small stones rode came over the height of Concord street and probably over the easterly flank of Winter hill. In the section by the church we see thinner layers of yellow sand sloping inward toward the west and away from the Merrimack river. That sand came down on

----

100

HISTORY OF NASHUA, N. II.

the Merrimack river ice when it stood a hundred feet or more above the bottom of the present bed of the river. It is the same kind of sand as that borne on the current of that river every spring. This hill or ridge, which still extends westwardly from Chandler street, between Tolles and Canal streets, though fast disappearing, being in great demand for gravel roofing and concrete sidewalks, was the terminal moraine of the Shattuck's ledge glacier. This moraine, with a break from Tolles street to Railroad square-west of which beginning at Beacon hill between Amherst and Auburn streets it becomes the moraine of the Winter hill glacier (and perhaps of a great northwestern ice stream)- extends clear across the north part of the city, taking in Fairmount in its course, and around to the " steep banks" on the Nashua. The two saucer shaped depressions, one just west of Chandler street and south of Lock, and the other on the site of Artillery pond on the North common, and the narrow depression extending across the Wilton railroad to the Nashua river north of the Fairmount terrace, are the beds of the lateral tongues of ice which reached down from the north, after they had receded from the ice rivers and come to a stand-still. The clay found west of Chandler street, and for many years used to such good purpose by the late Hon. Charles Williams in his foundry, is the paste made by this lateral glacier grinding down over the surface of Shattuck's ledge. When the water and ice fell below the top of the dam made by the bordering ridge, which dam as we have seen the ice itself had built up, the fine flour from the stone settled at the bottom, there being no current to take it away. That sediment gave Mr. Williams his clay bed. This clay extends into Lock street near the residence of the late Seneca Greeley and will be noticed by the pedestrian especially in wet weather. The break in this moraine mentioned above, extending from Tolles street on the east to Beacon hill on the west, is accounted for by the fact that just before the final disappearance of the last remnant of the continental ice cap a tongue of ice had gone down Concord street and across Railroad square, across the Nashua river, and southward along Main street, pushing before it its terminal moraine as far as the northeast corner of the South common, and on the west side of it as far as High street, and on the east side as far as the Pilgrim church, and retreating left there sections of the otherwise continuous moraine at the places indicated, where they constituted the considerable hills which were there found by the first settlers, but which have since been dug down and carried away.

Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.

History of the city of Nashua, N.H., Part 17

Author: Parker, Edward Everett, 1842- ed; Reinheimer, H., & Co Publication date: 1897 Publisher: Nashua, N.H., Telegraph Publishing Company Number of Pages: 652

Author: Parker, Edward Everett, 1842- ed; Reinheimer, H., & Co
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Nashua, N.H., Telegraph Publishing Company
Number of Pages: 652