History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 2

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 466

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2 Genesis I, II, Revised Version.

monotonous white beaches were strewed with green sea weed, while in the interior a small ground pine tree arose above the earth. The warm and temperate seas that stretched from pole to pole were the only waters yet exist- ing, and the only living creatures within them were shell- fish.

Another age now dawned upon the earth. Again the ocean was engaged in rock-making-sandstone or gritty shale, particularly in the Appalachian ridge. Fishes now first appeared, of the shark tribe, and other fish, some of them ten or twelve feet long, formidable creatures armed with horns. Trees in abundant verdure covered the earth in forests and great jungles, over vast marshes. A shallow sea covered much of New York and New Jersey, and as the earth subsided, layer upon layer of sandstone and other formations was deposited, as the earth sank slowly beneath the waters. Rocky islands loomed up here and there, where are now the lofty Appalachian mountains. The con- tinent was covered with forests and marshes, vegetation sub- jected at long intervals to inundations of fresh or marine waters. The vegetation became less, as the sea rose again over much of the continent. There was a new era of the making of sandstone, while limestone was formed in the interior. The air was still surcharged with carbonic acid gas, hostile to the higher forms of life, but affording nur- ture to the rank vegetation that everywhere prevailed. As the growth in the marshes and jungles absorbed the carbon, storing it away for the use of man, who as yet was unknown, these beds of decaying vegetation sank again beneath the level of the sea, to have deposited on them sandstone and slate, and here and there layers of iron ore, then to rise again and receive new accumulations of vegetation, absorbing again the carbonic acid gas in the air, to sink once more and be covered as before, and so on and on for untold ages, until the first beds of anthracite and bituminous coal were formed throughout the world. These jungles were the homes of reptiles that now appeared upon the earth-huge snakes, monstrous saurians, turtles and the like.

Again the whole earth was submerged beneath the ocean. An Artesian well has been sunk at Atlantic City on the New Jersey coast to a depth of fourteen hundred feet, without reaching the Archæan rocks below. The clay at the bot- tom of this well is full of fossil foraminifera, indicating that it was deposited at a time when the ocean was teeming with life, though of a low order.1 It has been estimated that the New Jersey coast is sinking at the rate of one or two feet in a century.2 If this rate has continued from the time that this foraminiferous clay was deposited, from seventy to one hundred and forty thousand years must have elapsed since the clay at the bottom of this well was washed by the ocean waves. The thickness of the rocks deposited during the Paleozoic time was fifty-five thousand feet. At

1 Reports by Lewis Woolman on Artesian Wells at Atlantic City, in Annual Reports of State Geologist, 1889 and 1890, and in Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia, March 25, 1890. In the last-named publication Mr. Woolman gives a list of 149 species of dia- toms found in the clay, from 383 to 658 feet helow the surface.

2 Geology of New Jersey, 1868, P. 362 ; Annual Report for 1881, P. 31.

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE PASSAIC FALLS.

the rate of a foot a century, this must have taken more than five million years to accumulate. When it is considered that during this time there were such frequent alternations of elevation and depression of the earth's crust, it is evident that this estimate in years is far below the mark. During the Palæozoic ages the New Jersey Highlands became prom- inent, and the first rivers on the new continent appeared- the Hudson, St. Lawrence and Connecticut. During the last of this period seven miles of subsidence took place along the Appalachian region, and elevations and depres- sions of the earth altered the character of the strata, turned the soft beds of coal into anthracite, while older rocks were changed to gneiss, mica, schist, slate and marble. As the earth became elevated the fury of the ocean became greater, and beat with increased power upon the shores of the conti- nent once more rising from its fierce embrace.

The Palæozoic age was succeeded by the Mesozoic, ush- ered in by the Triassic period. Now the present sandstone was deposited, as the ocean slowly washed away the granite and gneiss of the Archæan ranges, and converted the rocks into sand, which in process of time, by the action of the elements, became solidified into strata of stone. Thus there was formed a belt of sandstone, from ten to thirty miles wide, along the base of the Appalachian range, from Nova Scotia to South Carolina. In New Jersey the Triassic belt is about twenty miles wide, extending across the State from the Hudson to the Delaware, covering an area of fifteen hundred and forty-three square miles. The sandstone and shale are all in uniform layers, with a prevailing dip toward the Northwest. At Paterson, how- ever, the dip of the sandstone in the quarries at Garret Mountain is N. 80 degrees W., and the amount of dip is IO degrees; at Beattie's quarry, at Little Falls, the direction of the dip is N. 50 degrees W., and the amount is the same as at Paterson, 10 degrees. Fossil bird-tracks and water-pit- tings found in the rocks near Pompton, and limestone peb- bles found in the same beds at Paterson, 1 show that the sandstone is of sedimentary origin, even if we did not see the same kind of rock in process of formation at most lake shores to-day. Not only were there great birds on the earth at this time, and monstrous lizards and other reptiles, from ten to forty feet long, but the earliest types of mam- mals appeared also. The vegetation covering the land con- sisted largely of cone-bearing trees, a distinct species of which existed in this vicinity, fossil specimens having been found at Little Falls. The deposition of these beds of sandstone and shale went on for ages, the earth gradually sinking under the mighty mass, until perhaps five or six miles in thickness had been formed.2 As the sandstone beds were deposited upon the irregular hills and mountains

1 Fossils found in the sandstone quarries at Belleville in 1879 and since, seem to indicate that the formation belongs to the Upper Carbon- iferous, if not to an older period .- Annual Report N. J. State Geologist, 1879, P. 27.

2 By observing the angle of dip at various points, and the out-crop- ping ends of the beds of sandstone, it is calculated that the formation must be at least 27,000 feet thick. The greatest depth (2,100 feet) ever reached in the sandstone was found in boring the artesian well at the Pas- saic Rolling Mill, at Paterson, in 1879-80. A detailed account of this well is given at the end of this chapter.

of Archæan rocks beneath the waters of the ocean, they gradually subsided ; the older rocks were probably rising at the same time ; these being vastly harder than the other, the beds of sandstone bent, and finally broke here and there in lines parallel with the Archæan ranges.1 In many places one part of the bed went on sinking down the side of the granite hills, while the other portion of the bed remained stationary, and thus there was formed what geologists call a "fault" in the rock. Taking a comprehensive view of the earth's surface in the vicinity of Paterson at this period, we may imagine a horizontal bed of sandstone ex- tending at the same general level from New Brunswick or Princeton northeasterly to the present New York State line, and from the Hudson river twenty or thirty miles westerly to the present Archæan range. This is the sandstone now found in the quarries of Middlesex, Union, Somerset, Essex, Passaic and Bergen counties. We may imagine this sandstone bed gradually subsiding, and, in the neighbor- hood of Paterson, and along a line extending southeasterly for forty miles, resting upon a mass of rounded Archæan rock; the increasing weight of the ever-accumulating beds above gradually forced the sandstone to bend on each side of the immovable line below; it kept on bending until the breaking point was reached; then there was a fracture; the rock to the east and southeast slid down further, while the edge of the rock to the west of the break- ing line rose, forming a cliff, two, three or four hundred feet higher than the adjacent sandstone beds, and facing toward the east and southeast. The quarrying operations on the face of Garret Mountain show that there the sand- stone has a height of three hundred feet above the sea; the sandstone under Morris Mountain, and that in and near the Valley of the Rocks, at Riverside and at other points in Pater- son, is only from fifty to one hundred feet above tide-water. At Passaic, in the western part of the city, the sandstone is found at a depth of from thirty to sixty feet below the sur- face, or but little above tide level, while in the eastern sec- tion the sandstone is from one hundred to one hundred and twenty-five feet below the surface, or from eighty to one hundred feet below the level of the sea. This marked dif- ference in the position of the adjacent beds of sandstone certainly indicates a remarkable tilting in these beds, and probably a "fault" somewhere in this neighborhood, which might be caused in the manner described.

While these sandstone beds were being formed, and in many cases while they were still in a plastic state, a strange thing happened. Up through fissures which extended down to the fiery interior of the earth, there poured forth a mass of molten rock, of a new kind, which we call "trap." This fluid rock penetrated between the layers of the sandstone in all directions, separating the beds widely. Every fissure, every opening, was thus filled with red hot lava, and wherever there was loose earth, or beds of broken shale beneath the beds of sandstone, this liquid mass found its way. Strangely enough, this igneous eruption appears

1 There is strong reason for believing that some mighty external force was exerted on both the sandstone and the Archæan rocks to effect this deformation ; many geologists believe it was the power of the ocean, exerted from the east and southeast.

HISTORY OF PATERSON.

to have been of the same character throughout the Triassic formation, from Nova Scotia to North Carolina, and is seldom found elsewhere. In New Jersey it covers an area of about three hundred and thirty square miles. The peculiarity of this formation has attracted the attention of geologists for more than half a century, and fully seventy writers have written nearly two hundred articles in attempting to elucidate the subject. I The beds of trap ap- pear in bands of from three inches to several hundred feet in thickness. The adjacent sandstone was baked into hard grit, while the steam accompanying or generated by the eruption gave the lava in many places the appearance of volcanic scoriæ or cinders, or turned it into bosses and rounded masses like fused boulders. The most striking instances of this were formerly to be seen on Marion street, between Totowa and Union avenues; the rock appeared to have been a mass of boulders, fused together by the action of fire and water, the form of each boulder-like boss or rounded mass distinctly shown by the lines of the green carbonates of copper permeating the whole. 2 Occa- sionally the trap rock is divided by planes, parallel to the bedding, the texture of the rock above and below such planes of separation differing slightly, indicating that the rock was deposited by successive eruptions, each bed having time to cool before a new overflow occurred. Frequently cavities were formed in the hastily-cooled lava, and the steam or hot vapors caused these cavities to be filled with prehnite and other beautiful crystals, white, yellow or purple in color. In some places-as at Morris Mountain in Paterson, on the south side of the river, near Little Falls, and in a quarry at Orange-the later outflows of lava have assumed a prismatic or columnar form, 3 like the basaltic columns at

1 It may be remarked here that while the igneous origin of the trap rock has been accepted as a fact by geologists, with few exceptions, Professor Henry Wurtz, of Hoboken, a distinguisbed chemist, was at one time inclined to believe that possibly it might be shown on further investigation that the trap was a metamorphic rock, and was formed in situ. In other words, that the sandstone upon which the trap rock is invariably found to be superimposed, has undergone a chemical change into trap rock, and that this change is still in progress. The writer had noticed tbat on the side of Morris Mountain, there was a point where it was difficult to tell wbere the sandstone ended and tbe trap rock began, and in 1872 he pointed this out to Professor Wurtz, who re- garded it as a striking confirmation of his conjecture that the trap rock was chemically-transformed sandstone. So far as the writer is aware, although be had some subsequent correspondence with Professor Wurtz on this subject, the Professor never concluded his contemplated experi- ments to determine whether or not his conjecture was demonstrably correct. It was a bold conception quite characteristic of Prof. Wurtz, who was an original thinker. Of late years the microscope has come into use in testing doubtful rocks, and by this means it has been deter- mined beyond a doubt just where is the line of demarcation between the trap and the sandstone, and that there has been no fusion between them, and no chemical metamorphosis of one into the. other. The curious reader may find a presentation of Prof. Wurtz's idea in the Proceedings N. Y. Lyceum, Vol. I., 1871.

2 This rock, formerly ten feet above the level of the street, has been blasted out and removed for use as road material ; the quarry is now eight or ten feet below the surface of the street. It is softer than most trap rocks, and packs more readily. Tbis quarry has been a favorite resort of mineralogists for years, and great quantities of most beautiful specimens thence now enricb the cabinets of institutions and of private collectors.

3 A lithographic view of the columnar formation near Little Falls is given in the Annual Report of the State Geologist, 1882, page 53; the

the Giant's Causeway in Ireland. At Morris Mountain the trap rock overlies the sandstone in a horizontal bed twenty-five feet thick, and above this rises the columnar formation to a height of fifty feet.1 It has been conjectured2 that as the fiery mass came up from the bowels of the earth, it. passed through beds3 of iron ore and of copper, bringing up copper in the form of green carbonates and sulphides, and iron as oxides, which became dissemin- ated like vapor through the rocks, the oxide of iron color- ing the sandstone red. But Professor William Morris Davis, of Harvard University, who has studied the red sandstone and trap formations in and about Paterson for the last ten years or more, with great care, in a letter to the author says "there is little ground for this belief, and many facts militate against it. Sandstones remote from volcanic or igneous rocks are often red, and on the other hand many sandstones near such rocks are not red. More- over, the sandstones overlying the last trap overflow are not less red than those below." It is difficult to believe that the sandstone at Paterson should have been colored in the manner suggested to the depth of two thousand feet, as at the artesian well at the Passaic Rolling Mill; and it seems improbable that the coloring of this formation should have been thus produced so uniformly throughout its fifteen hundred square miles of arca. In a quarry near Haledon 4 the red sandstone is underlaid by a bed of sandstone nearly white. If the lava outflow was instrumental in dyeing the upper stratum red, why not this lower stratum also? On the whole, it is more reasonable to assume that the red color of the sandstone is an original characteristic as the sediment was deposited. Why it is red is as yet little understood. The same may be said as to the origin of the traces of copper in the trap rock. It is certain that the indications of copper were strikingly marked in the trap rock at Marion street; they have been noticed elsewhere along the First Mountain, and have led sanguine people to believe that

litbographic frontispiece to the Annual Report for 1884 gives three views of the basaltic columns at Orange. This tendency to a basaltic or columnar formation at the Passaic Falls was noticed as long ago as 1819, by Samuel Akerly, in his "Geology of tbe Hudson River, and the ad- jacent regions : illustrated by a Geological Section of the Country, from tbe neighbourbood of Sandy Hook, in New-Jersey, northward, through the Highlands in New-York, towards the Catskill Mountains." New York : 1820, P. 34.

1 This hill is being fast carried away for road material. A view of the hill as it appeared in 1868 is publisbed in the Geology of New Jersey, 1868, P. 103.

2 Geology of N. J., 1868, p. 338.

3 There are no true veins of iron ore in New Jersey ; the ore is always found in beds, indicating a sedimentary origin. The beds, bowever, have been usually so turned up in folds as to give them the appearance of veins.

4 On the upper High Mountain road, about a mile north of Haledon. First there is a layer of earth, about two feet; then trap rock, thirty feet; then two beds of red (or brown) sandstone, one lighter in color than the other, the two baving a total thickness of about twenty-five feet ; then red shale, four feet, and then a bed of sandstone, ligbt buff in color, closely resembling Ohio sandstone. This last layer has been opened for ten or fifteen feet, but its depth bas not been ascertained. This quarry was worked as long ago as 1815, by Capt. John Ander- son ; it is now (1892) owned by the New Jersey Brownstone Company.

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE PASSAIC FALLS.

untold wealth in the shape of copper lay beneath these rugged hills. The Palisades, First Mountain, Second Mountain and Preakness Mountain, or Black Oak Ridge, are all of this trap rock formation, now overlying the red sandstone; traces of a fourth ridge have been discovered within a few years. All these ridges are parallel, and all have a crescent form, somewhat roughly corresponding to . the general trend of the chains of Archæan rocks to the northwest. The First Mountain, of which Garret Mount- ain is a conspicuous part, apparently began at Sicomac, beyond High Mountain, and extends southwesterly forty- three miles to Pluckamin, in Somerset county, its crest run- ning uniformly from four hundred and fifty to five hundred and fifty feet in height, the even crest being broken by a few depressions, and some peaks rising to a height of between six hundred and seven hundred feet. The Second Mountain extends from Pompton on the north, southeast- erly by way of High Mountain, and thence southwesterly to Mount Horeb, Somerset county, with an inward westerly curve to Bernardsville. The height of its crest varies but little from five hundred and fifty feet, except at the few gaps, and at such exceptional peaks as High Mountain (878 feet) and at Caldwell (684 feet). The Third Mountain runs like the letter u laid horizontally, from Pompton to Mount- ain View, Montville and Pine Brook, the height being from three hundred and fifty to four hundred and fifty feet. The Palisades tower up in stately grandeur above the Hud- son five hundred and twenty feet near the New York State line, gradually diminishing in height, to disappear at Ber- gen Point, perhaps to reappear in the short trap ridge at Rocky Hill.1 The Palisades and the First and Second Mountains terminatc in hooks, turning inwards, or westerly, toward the concave side.2 These hooks are believed by Darton3 to be entirely due to flexures of the rocks. 4 Prof. Davis says "the cause of the curved trend of the trap ridges is sufficiently found in the unequal uplift of different parts and subsequent erosion to baselevel."5

There has been much discussion among geologists as to whether these ridges of trap were formed simultaneously, or whether they are the result of successive outflows, at long intervals of time; and if they were not formed at one period, then which appeared first.6 Then there is another

question of peculiar interest as bearing on the Geological His- tory of the Passaic Falls: Were these trap rocks formed by the intrusive flow of the lava between the layers of sand- stone and shale, the upper layers of the softer rocks being subsequently eroded or worn away ? Or, did the trap, in at least some places, overflow the sandstone, and become im- mediately exposed to the air, as at present ?

Let us see how the earth's surface in this neighborhood has changed since those early days. As already remarked, the Archæan ranges in Northern New Jersey were washed by the ocean, which dashed in wild waves against their base, ground the rocks into fragments and strewed them in the shallow water along the shore. Wind and rain aided in the erosion and denudation, and gradually the debris at the base of the mountains spread further and further out into the ocean, till a fringe of mud, and, in time, of sand- stone, was formed. This went on and on till there was an almost level plain (a peneplain 1) of sandstone, extending from the Archæan ridges on the west to and beyond the present Hudson river on the east. The territory of New Jersey has never been agitated by lofty volcanoes, belching forth flame and masses of rock ; but at certain periods, while the deposition of the red sandstone was going on, great fissures have opened in the crust of the globe, and through them there have welled forth fiery rivers of lava, 2 spreading out over a large part of the surface of the newly- forming rock, before it had become fairly consolidated into

1 Tbe heights here given are taken from tbe Topographical Atlas of New Jersey.

2 It is thought that the trap mountains of the Ramapo valley are a continuation of the First Watchung sbeet .- The Relations of the Traps of the Newark System in the New Jersey Region, by Nelson Horatio Darton, Bulletin No. 67, U. S. Geological Survey, Washington, D. C., 1890.

3 As cited above.

4 The curious outlines of the trap ridges are very clearly shown on the Geological Map of New Jersey accompanying the Annual Report of the State Geologist for 1881. Tbe hook at the northerly terminus of the Palisades is in New York State.

5 In a letter to the author. He adds: " There has not been given any good reason for referring the curvature to the attitude of the rocks below, except so far as the uplift of the lower rocks accompanied tbe uplift of the Triassic formation."

6 In the American Journal of Science, April, 1878, there was puh- lished an article by Israel C. Russell, " On tbe Intrusive Nature of the Triassic Trap Sbeets of New Jersey," in which the writer relates bow

he discovered, near Feltville, on the western slope of First Mountain, a spot where the trap rock was overlaid by a bed of sandstone and shale twenty-five or tbirty feet thick. He regarded this as "indisputa- ble evidence that the igneous rocks, composing the First Newark Mountain, were intruded in a molten state between the layers of tbe stratified rocks subsequent to their consolidation." In a paper by the same writer, " On the Geology of Hudson County, New Jersey," read before the New York Academy of Sciences, April, 1880, and published in its " Annals," be gives many additional reasons for this conclusion, and argues that Bergen Hill was at one time covered by sandstone and shale 7,000 to 8,000 feet thick. In 1882 Davis examined the rocks at Felt- ville more carefully, and discovered no traces of the alteration described by Rogers, Cook and Russell, but on the contrary found that the vesicu- lar, slag-like rock was overlaid by unaltered shales with an intervening trap breccia (angular fragments of trap) at some points. This breccia was alone considered satisfactory proof of the extrusive nature of the sheet, and he stated his opinion that it could only bave been formed on tbe surface of a pre-existent sbeet of lava .- On the Relations of the Tri- assic Traps and Sandstones of the U. S., by W. M. Davis, in Bulletin Lyceum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard College, 1883, Vol. VII., No. 9. In an article, " Tbe Geological History of New York Island and Har- bor," in the Popular Science Monthly, October, 1878, Prof. J. S. Newberry, of Columbia College, assumed that the First and Second Mountains were covered with sandstone and shale to a depth of several bundred feet, at least. The late Prof. George H. Cook, State Geologist of New Jersey, 1863-1889, concluded that the trap rocks were " of older age than the red sandstone and shale in which they occur, and that they were intruded after those sedimentary rocks had been elevated to their present posi- tion," "although they may have overflowed for short distances, from tbe out-crop of their intrusive sheet."-Annual Reports, 1883, p. 22; 1886, p. 127.

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History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 2

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914 Publication date: 1901 Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co. Number of Pages: 466

Author: Nelson, William, 1847-1914
Publication date: 1901
Publisher: Paterson : Press Printing and Publishing Co.
Number of Pages: 466