History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 3

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

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1 This word was coined by Davis.

2 " The igneous rocks of New Jersey are remarkably uniform petro- graphically, as they are all basalts varying mainly in structure and development. The eruptions are fine grained generally, somewhat glassy, and the intrusives are coarser grained, generally being doleritic, in some cases inclosing considerable biotite and often near gabbro in structure."-Darton, as cited.

HISTORY OF PATERSON.

stone .. These streams continued for an incalculable length of time, and at irregular intervals, perhaps centuries apart. The first of these outflows in this part of New Jersey formed a bed of trap rock hundreds, possibly thousands of feet in thickness,1 lying in a horizontal position above the sandstone.2 Then the earth's surface sank slowly below the ocean level, and a new bed of sandstone was deposited, of unknown depth, above the trap rock. New fissures were opened, and fresh streams of lava poured forth, spreading out over the most recent sandstone, and, where this had been worn off, then upon the former beds of lava.3 It was proba- bly at this time that the lava rising through a fissure that did not extend to the surface, forced its way between beds of sandstone, which, being subsequently worn and scraped off, left the bold escarpment of the Palisades. 4

Neither the sandstone nor the trap was for a moment at rest. Born of the warring elements, both, true to their origin, were forever at strife with themselves and with each other. They were no sooner deposited than they strove to change their position. Then there was a Titanic struggle ! The sandstone exerted itself to the very base of its vast depth to gather strength to hurl off the enormous superincumbent mass of lava. The contest lasted for ages, is waging yet ! The victory thus far is with neither of the writhing combatants. The under one, it is true, uplifted itself, and at the same time with a gigantic effort heaved up the overlying beds of lava, which were in many places fractured in the struggle, and their rough edges exposed to the denuding influences of air and water. This tilting of the lava or trap rock beds has occurred more than once. The uplift has not been equal throughout the Triassic region; sonie parts of the trap have been raised higher than others. Nor has the erosion been always and everywhere at the same rate. In the mighty warfare of the rocks, "faults" have occurred in the lava bed at our famed

1 The southern edge of the trap sheet, at Rocky Hill, is estimated to be fifteen hundred or two thousand feet thick. This would indi- cate an enormous depth originally, at Paterson, and a vast extension of its northern edge skyward. Only a fragment of this edge now re- mains.

2 There is no evidence of successive lava flows in First Mountain.

3 In 1882 Prof. Davis found the base of the Second Watchung mountain resting on apparent tuff (tufa, volcanic rock) deposits on the west bank of the Passaic river a short distance below Little Falls, indicating that there had been a second overflow of lava. The conformable beds and the amygdular (having almond-shaped crevices) and ropy-surfaced rock of the First Mountain trap are exposed at Morris Mountain and at Garret Mountain .- Darton, as cited. Prof. Cook called attention to the underlying bed of conglomerate at Morris Mountain, in his Report for 1882 (p.36), and made some very suggestive remarks on its significance. What Prof. Cook said was always regarded with great respect by geol- ogists throughout the world.

4 " The extrusive sheets are characterized by their deep vesicularity and alteration, or slag-like aspect of their upper surfaces, the unaltered and undisturbed condition of the enclosing strata, the presence of trap breccias at their bases, the evidence of successive flows, their relations to anterior tuff deposits, and their distinctive columnar structure and petrography. The intrusive sheets are characterized by irregular lower contacts in which the trap cuts across the ragged edges of the strata for greater or less distances, the intense alteration in the enclosing strata, the increased density and fineness of grain, and the bedded structure in the trap near the contacts, and the absence of vesicularity and breccias." -Darton, as cited above.

cataract, one part sinking and another rising, and so there have been fractures and fissures, which are ever widening, from the movements of the rocks, and the wear of the elements. The upturned edge of the trap rock has been eroded unevenly, as the texture of the lava itself varied, and other forces, yet to be named, were tirelessly, incessantly at work.

And so it is that to-day, instead of a dull, uninteresting plain, we behold the beautifully-diversified landscape of the Triassic region of Northern New Jersey, of which the trap ridges of the Palisades and the First and Second Mountains, with the lovely intervening valleys, are such conspicuous and delightful features, and amid which the most striking and fascinating spectacle in all its varied natural scenery has been the Passaic Falls. 1

When was the Passaic river first2 formed ? When did its waters first pour over the present cataract at Paterson ? From the time the Archæan ridges lifted their heads above. the ocean, the rains descending upon them have formed channels wherein they might the more readily find their way back to the sea. As the Appalachian chain has always sloped toward the southeast, the rivers of the: Atlantic coast have uniformly flowed in the same direction, except where diverted by local causes. So this Triassic coun- try was plowed by water courses in that far off age, and they had their share in wearing away the rocks, both sand- stone and trap. The location of those streams it would not be easy to determine now, but they would naturally be in the valleys between the trap ridges, and would, as naturally, flow toward the southeast. Take a map of New Jersey, and you will observe that all the rivers in this sec- tion have this course. There is a part exception-that por- tion of the Passaic river which, above the Big Piece meadows, flows northeasterly and northerly, but so reluctantly as to. suggest that it has been diverted from its true course, and might be easily persuaded to return to it. Although there: is no direct evidence of it, the dip of the Cretaceous forma- tion in Central and Southern New Jersey indicates that it would, if extended, reach the base of Schooley's Mountain,. and cover all the trap regions, and Prof. Davis believes. that was the case when, at the close of the Triassic period, this locality was submerged in the ocean. This subniergence would be gradual, of course; so would be the deposit of pulverized shells, and there is every reason for believing that the rivers could easily hold substantially to- their old courses, perhaps rising to higher levels as the

1 In this account of the origin of the present topography of the Trias- sic region the writer has adopted the views of Davis and of Darton, the most recent systematic investigators of this section of New Jersey .. These views are fully given in a paper on " The Geographical Develop- ment of Northern New Jersey," by William Morris Davis and J. Walter Wood, Jr., in Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History, Vol. XXIV., November, 1889 ; "The Rivers of Northern New Jersey," by William Morris Davis, in the National Geographic Magazine, Vol. II., May, 1890, pp. 81-110; " The Relations of the Traps of the Newark System in the New Jersey Region," by Nelson Horatio Darton, in Bul- letin No. 67, of the U. S. Geological Survey, Washington, 1890. Par- ticular acknowledgment is due to Prof. Davis, who was kind enough to. revise the proofs of this part of this chapter, and to suggest some cor- rections and alterations from his own profound knowlege of this locality ..

2 This expresssion, " first formed," is used advisedly.

GEOLOGICAL HISTORY OF THE PASSAIC FALLS.

chalk deposits accumulated. In some cases the beds of rivers were determined by "faults" in the mountain ridges. The Pequannock is located on an ancient fault line, the beds of the corresponding rocks on the opposite sides of its valley differing a thousand feet. There is some reason for believing that a similar "fault" exists in the Wanaque valley. The Pequannock, Wanaque and Ramapo rivers found their way southeasterly across or through the trap ridges to a point probably north of Paterson, and so formed what is now the lower part of the Passaic river. Another stream flowed through the ridge at Little Falls, on to and through the Great Notch (where traces of water action are still discernible), not unlikely carving out the ·original channel of the primal Third river. The Rockaway found a more direct way to the ocean by uniting with the Rahway, and the more remote headwaters of the Passaic joined their nearest neighbor, the Raritan. All these streams were then, as now, forever seeking the lowest channels, and were incessantly fretting away their banks. As they widened and deepened they "captured " the nearest tributaries. The original Passaic was a larger, fiercer stream than others. It sought and discovered lower depths for its channel. It reached out and found other streams to add to its volume. Its appetite was whetted by what it fed on. After a while the river flowing through Little Falls and the Great Notch became its prey. Still unsatisfied it extended its grasp, and in time seized upon the Rockaway, diverting it from its Rahway outlet. This history was repeated, till the upper part of the river, gorged to repletion, had barely current enough, or was too unwilling, to turn from its obviously natural course, and flow north- ward to the sea by way of Paterson.1 This predatory disposition of the ancient Passaic has led Prof. Davis to term it a "piratical " river. But however apt the phrase to characterize its youth, our lovely, tranquil stream has atoned for its early indiscretions by thousands of years of most decorous behavior.

It has been suggested above that the headwaters of the Passaic joined the main river somewhere north of the present Paterson. The sudden ending of the First Mount- ain at Garret Rock and at the Falls, to emerge again near Sicomac, suggests a "fault," or a subsidence in the lava bed, or else a softer texture of the rock that formerly filled this gap. The tilting up of the bed of lava here, and the exposure of its fractured edge,2 have aided in wearing it away more rapidly than otherwise would have been the case. The river gladly leaped over this edge, as the shortest way to the ocean, and added its power to the atmospheric forces to back the cataract up stream, ever grinding and eating away the less hard portions of the rock,

1 See Davis and Wood, as cited, on " The Geographical Development of Northern New Jersey," and Davis on "The Rivers of Northern New Jersey."

2 " A geological examination of the district leads to the conviction that the trap sheets, like the sedimentary beds between them, have formerly had a great extension upward along the plane of their dip, into the air, just as they still have an undetermined extension downward into the ground; their present edges simply mark the lines back to which the sheets have been consumed by denuding forces of one kind or another."-Davis and Wood, as above.

until at last the water was half imprisoned in the narrow chasm where we now see it struggling desperately to es- cape, and compelled to turn sharply upon itself ere it regains its liberty.

With the dawn of the Quaternary age there came another prodigious change over the northern part of the American continent. The surface of the globe was slowly elevated- moderately in this latitude, and several hundred feet as far north as Labrador. 1 For some reason as yet not under- stood2 the earth in the higher latitudes, where a temperate climate had previously prevailed, was now subjected to a great precipitation of moisture, turning first into snow and then into ice ; this increased the condensation of moisture, and the ice went on forming, thickening and spreading out, from the Atlantic ocean to the Rocky Mountains, and from the Arctic regions as far south as Perth Amboy in New Jer- sey, its boundary in this State being generally a line drawn from Perth Amboy northwesterly to Rockaway and thence slightly southwesterly to the Delaware river near Oxford. 3 Its southern border extended westward in an irregular line, the Ohio and Missouri rivers roughly marking its lower terminus in the Mississippi valley. Thus this great ice sheet covered an area of four million square miles in America. An area of half the size in Europe was buried at the same time under an icy covering. The slope of the frigid blanket in America was not uniform, but it was suffi- cient to give the whole mass a southern impetus.4 Near Summit and Feltville, in New Jersey, about a mile from its edge, the thickness was probably a thousand feet. In the

1 Warren Upham estimates the pre-glacial uplift in the vicinity of New York and Philadelphia at 1,200 feet above its present level. The famous Saguenay river below Quebec has a depth of from 300 to 840 feet below sea level ; its channel must have been eroded when the land in its neighborhood was 1,000 feet higher than now .- The Ice Age in North America, by G. Frederick Wright, New York, 1891, pp. 577-8 ; Proceed- ings of the Boston Society of Natural History, XXIV., 453.

2 It seems to be generally admitted now by geologists that elevation of the land is not enough alone to produce glaciation ; constant moisture, causing snow deposits, is more important. Nor is intense cold neces- sary, for some of the Alaskan and most of the Alpine glaciers descend to within 3,000 or 4,000 feet of the ocean's level. The various theories and the objections to them are clearly presented in Dr. Wright's " Ice Age in America," pp. 405-447, and in his " Man and the Glacial Period," 1892, PP. 302-331. In an appendix to the former work (pp. 573-595) War- ren Upham exhaustively reviews the whole subject, and presents a very plausible hypothesis of his own. His copious references are a val- uable contribution to the bibliography of the subject. See also article by Prof. J. S. Newberry in the Popular Science Monthly, November, 1886, on " North America in the Ice Age."

3 Its terminal moraine (the debris deposited at its margin) is very clearly shown on the Geological Map of New Jersey, 1886.

4 The glacier moved into New Jersey from the northeast. Maps showing the general movements of the great ice sheet are given in the Sixth Annual Report U. S. Geological Survey, p. 205, and in Wright's Ice Age in North America, p. 175. The direction of movement was not uniform, but varied according to local and other conditions. At the gap west of High Mountain, near Paterson, the glacial scratches on the trap rock are S. 30° to 40° W .; at Second Mountain, west of Paterson, the direction is S. 80° W .; on the Little Falls road, S. 75° W. ; at Paramus, near the Reformed church, S. 30° W. Particularly near the southern border of the ice sheet it would branch off in various directions, in- stead of having a single movement .- Annual Report State Geologist, 1878, p. 10. It has been estimated that " the rate of motion of the gla- cier could hardly have exceeded a foot a day, and may have been in most parts no more than a foot a week." -- Dana, as cited, 539.

HISTORY OF PATERSON.

neighborhood of the Catskills the slope was only about seventeen feet to the mile, and further north the surface of the ice sheet approximated to a great level plain.1 The average ascent in this part of the country was probably twenty-five feet per mile, for the first one hundred or two hundred miles,2 and the average thickness of the glacier throughout its entire extent was at least three quarters of a mile, 3 while in some sections it may have been two miles or more. "The ice-current passed over the Green Mountains where they are from 3,000 to 5,000 feet in height in a course diagonal to that of their general direction, showing that such a mountain-chain made scarcely more of a ripple in the moving mass than a sunken log would make in a shallow river."4 At the Delaware Water Gap, the valley was filled with a frozen river eighteen hundred feet deep, rising six hundred feet above the Kittatinny Mountains. 5 This point was only about ten miles from the margin of the ice sheet, while Paterson is twenty miles north of the ancient terminal moraine. It is safe to assume that the glacier was quite two thousand feet thick over the present bed of the Passaic river, and rose fully fifteen hundred feet above Garret Rock as we now see it.

The mighty power of this enormous mass, with a pres- sure of scores of tons6 to the square foot, can hardly be imagined. The vast forests that covered the earth were torn up by the roots and carried along by the resistless force of the Glacier, ground to bits, or deposited as mutilated logs in the depressions passed over. Loose soil and soft rock was relentlessly scraped off and carried along to be deposited here and there in wide depressions, or to be piled up on the mountain sides, two, three or five thousand feet above the level of the sea. Fragments of projecting cliffs were broken off, weighing thousands of tons, at times as big as good-sized houses, and then were dropped upon lofty plateaus to be the wonder of men to- day.7 Other rocks were ground together and finally left be-

1 Prof. John C. Smock, now (1892) State Geologist of New Jersey, in American Journal of Science, vol. 125, 1883, P. 339.

2 Warren Upham, in Proceedings Boston Society of Natural History, XXIV., 451.

3 Wright, Man and the Glacial Period, 330.

4 Wright, The Ice Age in North America, 166.

5 Second Gelogical Survey of Pennsylvania, Vol. Z, p. XIV. An admirable little sketch, "On the Glacial and Modified Drift" of New Jersey, is given in the State Geologist's Report for 1878, pp. 8-23, being the first detailed account published of the glacial action in New Jersey, although it had been referred to in the Report for 1877. The subject is treated at greater length in the Annual Report for 1880, pp. 14-97. In the Report for 1891 (pp. 35-108), Prof. R. D. Salisbury, of the U. S. Geological Survey, Writes very fully " On Drift or Pleistocene Form- ations of New Jersey," the paper being well illustrated.

6 Dana estimates the weight of the ice at 450 pounds per square inch for every 1,000 feet of thickness .- Manual of Geology, 539. This would be- 48 tons per square foot where the thickness was.1,500 feet, as it is estimated to have been on Garret Mountain, and 64 tons per square foot in the lower Passaic valley. Prof. Newberry, in the Popular Science Monthly, November, 1886, estimates the pressure of ice 1,000 feet thick, at 54,810 pounds to the square foot.

7 Mount Washington presents many examples. Near Paterson, on High Mountain, 878 feet above tide water, the ledges show the south- ward movement of the ice, and there are many boulders from three to ten feet in diameter perched on the smooth ledges. Many in New

hind as huge boulders. Even the hard trap rock about Paterson was scraped and ground away to an extent impos- sible to estimate1 by this enormous Glacier, aided by the action of the frost and water flowing beneath the accumu- lating mass of ice.

We owe to glacial action much of the beauty of the landscape in various parts of the country. It is believed that in pre-glacial times there were few waterfalls and fewer lakes, as to-day they are seldom found beyond the regions of glacial drift. The moving ice sheet occasionally mowed down the divide between watersheds, and on the other hand frequently choked up ancient watercourses. In this way it furthered the schemes of predatory rivers. It would seem probable that thus the united Pequannock-Wanaque- Ramapo river, which previously formed the headwaters of the Passaic, was diverted into the Pompton, and so went to swell the Third river, which then extended through the Great Notch and beyond Little Falls. But the same action which thus diverted these important tributaries from their old channel, in the course of ages choked up the gap at the Great Notch, and co-operated in the efforts of the Passaic to capture the headwaters of the Third river, and at the same time restored to its rightful owner the streams which for a while had fallen prey to its rival. The beautifully- rounded hills of earth, often gathered together like sheep huddling in a field;2 the broad plains of alluvial soil, the lovely lakes that gem so many of our mountain tops, the valleys filled with. fertility, the long slopes adorned with richest verdure, and not infrequently the dancing brooks that leap down the hillsides and meander through green meadows-all are due to that vast ice sheet that once cov- ered the earth like a winding sheet. So often is death the gateway to life and loveliness. South of Paterson the soil is in many places underlaid with a deep bed of small rounded boulders and pebbles, overlaid by a bed of clay. These are also the result of glacial action. The long train of boulders lying on the ground east of the Erie railway, between Clay street and Lake View, have been brought scores, perhaps hundreds of miles, and deposited there by the glacier of prehistoric days. There are few or no signs of any important alteration having been wrought at the Pas- saic Falls by glacial action, although undoubtedly frost has done much to wear away the edge of the lava sheet. But unlike Niagara, Minnehaha and most other cataracts, our own Falls do not owe their origin to the damming up of a

England are described and illustrated in Wright's "Ice Age in North America," pp. 205 et seq. One weighs 2,300 tons; another, at Fall River, 5,400 tons ; Mohegan Rock, Montville, Conn., 10,000 tons. Near Drakestown, Morris county, N. J., a mass of blue limestone, 36x30 feet, was quarried for years, to a depth of 20 feet, before it was discov- ered to be a boulder, transported by glacial action from the limestone range to the northwest .- Annual Report State Geologist, 1880, p. 30. Boulders of gneiss twenty feet long are found in the drift near Oldham brook, west of Paterson. They must have been carried ten or fifteen miles at least.

1 "Along this whole Appalachian border there were formerly Arch- æan highlands of indefinite height of which the stumps are all that now remain in the present hills and mountains."-Wright, The Ice Age in North America, p. 438. Their reduction in size is due to pre-glacial de- nudation even more than to glacial erosion.

2 And hence called roches moutonnees.

A PRE-HISTORIC "LAKE PASSAIC."

previous channel by glacial drift. The only ancient water- course possible between the First and Second Mountains was over the bed of trap. The river has formerly flowed at a much higher elevation than now, and may have poured over the lava edge at any one of a dozen places between Garret Rock and the ridge west of Totowa, but it has always kept within those limits. It is very probable that during the Glacial age the river below the Falls was choked up with debris, which was washed out at the close of that period. It is also likely that when the last ice had disap- peared, the river was plunging over the long stretch of prec- ipice, extending from the northerly extremity of the chasm through which it now pours, to the southerly extremity of the chasm or ravine adjoining the Little Falls road south of Spruce street. The water constantly wearing down the channel has found its present bed, wherein it has flowed certainly for two centuries; and perhaps for ten thousand years. 1

As just remarked, the Glacial age2 was remarkable for the formation of lakes, sometimes by the erosion of valleys, making extensive basins, and in many cases by the depo- sition of debris, decomposed by the Glacier, which raised dams across the ancient beds of rivers, and so held the water back. Such a dam was piled up at the present Passaic Falls, extending from Totowa across the valley to Garret Rock. Through thousands of years it increased in volume, until the water rose to a height of three hundred and eighty feet above the sea, or more than two hundred feet higher than the bed of the river as it is now above the Falls. Thus a lake was formed, more than thirty miles long, two hun- dred feet or more in depth, and from one to seven miles in width. The ancient shingled beaches of this pre-historic "Lake Passaic," as it has been happily named, may still be

1 The Niagara Falls bave receded seven miles through the hard lime- stone in wbicb the river has cut its channel. Tbe most careful, accu- rate observations and measurements have led geologists to agree within the past few years that this recession bas taken place since the glacial period, and probably within seven thousand years .- Wright, Ice Age in North America, 458.

2 It should be noted here that of late years geologists bave generally agreed that there have been at least two Glacial periods in America. Mr. W. J. McGee, of the U. S. Geological Survey, in an address be- fore the Geological Society of America, August, 1892, expressed the belief that there had been three successive ice sheets, separated by warm epochs ; the first ice age, he thought, " witnessed a reduction in the area of the land through oceanic submergence; the other ice ages showed less submergence, but in none of them was the elevation much greater than is now presented along the coast." In 1891 Prof. Rollin D. Salis- bury, of the U. S. Geological Survey, discovered what he considered unmistakable evidences in New Jersey of drift deposited by an earlier Glacier than the one whose terminal moraine ends about tbe latitude of Amboy .- Annual Report State Geologist, 1891, pp. 102-8. A map showing the course of the ice sheet (tbe latest) east of the Mis- souri river is given in the Sixth Annual Report of the U. S. Geological Survey, 1884-85, p. 205. The results wrought by ice and floods, as described above in the text, may have been effected at one period or another, or by successive eras of glaciers and subsequent floods. It may be added that Dr. Wright doubts a succession of Glacial epochs, although willing to believe that there may have been occasional recessions of the front, lasting a few centuries,-The Ice Age in North America, 480 ; Man and the Glacial Period, 117.

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History of the city of Paterson and the County of Passaic, New Jersey, Part 3

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