A Centennial Memorial History of Allegany county, New York, Part 15

Author: Minard, John Stearns, 1834-1920; Merrill, Georgia Drew
Publication date: 1896
Publisher: Alfred, N.Y., W. A. Fergusson & co.
Number of Pages: 1102

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HISTORY OF ALLEGANY COUNTY, N. Y.

in spanning the chasm of the Genesee at Portage, which was done by con- structing a wooden bridge 800 feet long and nearly 250 feet high .* This road, which forms a part of the Buffalo division of the Erie railway system, enters our county in Grove, and passing southeasterly leaves our borders a little south of the middle of the east line of Burns.

In 1878 the Genesee Valley canal was abandoned by the state, and soon after a company was formed which purchased from the state authorities the banks, prism and structures of the canal. Work was commenced on a rail- road along its course and prosecuted with such dispatch as to enable the road to be soon opened for business. It has proved of great benefit to the people and places along its route, and is now a part of the Western New York and Pennsylvania system.

Various other railroad projects have been started with as various suc- cesses, and surveys almost beyond number have been made to demonstrate the practicability of different routes. The Rochester, Nunda and Pennsyl- vania Railroad Company was organized April 9, 1870, the termini of the road designed to be constructed being Mt. Morris and Belmont, with connections which would reach the oil and coal fields of Pennsylvania. The towns along its proposed route were appealed to for help, and Birdsall bonded for $20,- 000 and Angelica for $65,000. In 1872 a corporation was organized to con- struct a road from the southern terminus of this road to a point upon the southern line of the state near Mill Grove in Cattaraugus county, and, two days later, another company, which took the name of "the Northern Ex- tension of the Rochester, Nunda and Pennsylvania Railroad Company," was organized, with the object of constructing and operating a road from Mt. Morris to Rochester. On March 12, 1872, these corporations were merged in one company under the corporate name of " Rochester, Nunda and Pennsylvania Railroad Company." In Pennsylvania " The Northern Navigation and Rail- road Company was organized to build a road from Reynoldsville to Mill Grove. On the 6th of June, 1872, this company was absorbed by the Rochester, Nunda and Pennsylvania Railroad Company, and the road was to be continued southerly to form one continuous road through Monroe, Livingston, Alle- gany and Cattaraugus counties, and Mckean, Elk, Cameron, Jefferson and Clearfield counties in Pennsylvania to Brookville. This company, January 1, 1873, executed bonds bearing seven per cent interest to the amount of $4 .- 050,000, and to secure the payments of the bonds and interest gave a mort- gage. The company had previously to this secured stock subscriptions tothe amount of $1,085,000, $645,000 of which were town and city subscriptions, and $525,000 had been collected. Work had been commenced, and with material furnished had cost about $1,000,000, and payments to the amount of $925,000 had been made, $525,000 in cash from subscriptions and $400,000 in stock of the company taken at par by contractors for work done and ma- terial furnished. Owing to a depressed condition of business and finance

* This was the largest structure of the kind in the world. It has since been burned and replaced by a gigantic iron bridge.

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the bonds did not meet with ready sale, and the company in order to insure traffic for the road, by Alfred Lockhart its president, on the 25th of Decem- ber, 1873, purchased about 5,000 acres of coal and timber land in Pennsylva- nia. The grading of the road from Mt. Morris to Belvidere had been mostly finished, when, under a decree of foreclosure of the mortgage held by the Union Trust Company on so much of the road as was located in this state, it was sold at Nunda. May 7, 1877, to Frank D. Lake of Nunda for $5,000. Since that time several re-organizations have been effected, and its history has been one of alternate prosperity and adversity, and to-day, as a result, a line of railroad is running from Angelica to Hornellsville, known as the Central New York and Western. For a while a connecting link from the line of this road at Angelica to the W. N. Y. & P. railway about a mile south of Belfast station, was operated, and a narrow-gauge road from Angelica, crossing the Genesee a little way above the Transit bridge, to Friendship, Nile. Bolivar, and on through Genesee to Olean, a part of this route being the same as was later covered by the Bolivar, Eldred and Cuba narrow- gauge railroad which was chartered, May 11, 1881, to run from Cuba to Lit- tle Genesee, and built its chief division from Wellsville, through Alma and Bolivar to Ceres, 24 miles. This company had 58.25 miles of track, and the road did good work for a few years, but trade languishing with the decline of oil, it was abandoned in 1893.

The Wellsville, Coudersport and Pine Creek railroad, chartered Nov. 14, 1881, was capitalized at $100,000, and built about twelve miles of road south- easterly from Wellsville into Pennsylvania. It was sold for $110.000 in September, 1895, to F. H. and C. W. Goodyear, the great lumber operators, to form a link of their Buffalo and Susquehanna railroad system (see Wells- ville).

The New York and Pennsylvania railroad chartered in 1895, is an east- ern extension of the Olean, Oswayo and Coudersport railroad, and crosses the southeastern corner of the county, from Genesee, Pa., through Cryder creek valley to Whitesville and Steuben county.

The Tonawanda Valley and Cuba railroad, from Attica, through Arcade, Sandusky and Rushford to Cuba, was begun in May, 1881, and an excursion train was run, July 1, 1882, from Rushford to Cuba. The road was in oper- ation only a few years, and the portion traversing this county is entirely abandoned (see Rushford).

Some other railroads are proposed and their construction seriously con- templated. One from Belmont to Belfast, following the route of the Bel- mont and Buffalo railroad which was graded for a part of the way through the towns of Amity, Angelica, Belfast, Caneadea and Hume, by a company which was organized in the winter of 1871, the work being suspended, and portions of the road sold to satisfy judgments. Several towns have reason to remember the B. & B. railroad company-having bonded to aid in its construction.

At the present time Allegany is well supplied with railroad facilities,

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and her public highways are being rapidly improved. The grand old town of Alfred, the seat of the first academic institution of the county, as well as its only University, has this year put in a macadamized road from the vil- lage to the station, a distance of nearly two miles. This is the first road of the kind in the county. "Good roads " is now the watchword, and they are imperatively demanded not only by people who ride in fine carriages, or astride the bicycle visit with the speed of winged messengers every part of our county, but by the farmer as well, in order to facilitate the hauling of large and paying loads of produce to the nearest railroad station. Public attention is aroused and points to better roads, and the best minds of the age are at work on vehicles with electric or other motors; and possibly be- fore this book is delivered to its subscribers an enterprising Allegany car- riage maker will introduce one of the horseless carriages upon our roads. And so it goes ! The one continuous mud hole of the pioneers' day has dried up and disappeared; 1795 has given way to 1895, the modern "Conklin " or " Milburn " wagon has succeeded the drag; the stylish coupe the heavy old linchpin style of lumber wagon; the Portland cutter the oxsled, and the end is not yet!

CHAPTER XXIII.

GEOLOGY AND PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY .*

BY CHARLES BUTTS, ESQ.

H OW were the hills and valleys of our county formed ? Whence came the stones filled with casts of the animals and plants which lived in the ocean waters or along those ancient shores? How came they in their pres- ent places? These are questions of the inquiring mind to which the geolo- gist seeks the answer. The rocks are written over with the fascinating tales of other days which tell the wonderful story of the earth and its inhabitants. Many, many ages ago, a vast thickness of rocks was formed. The most ancient rocks known are crystalline, like granite. They are found over large areas in Canada, but in smaller areas in other parts of the world, and are supposed to underlie the sedimentary rocks. From the Canadian area an- other large area once extended southwestward parallel to the Appalachian mountains and east of them. These rocks are known as the Archæan sys- tem and the time during which they were formed, as the Archæan era.

Partially enclosed by the two areas of Archæan rocks mentioned and

* The writer would hereby express his thanks to that eminent geologist, Prof. W. H. Pitts, for his careful revision of this chapter.

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extending indefinitely southward and westward lay the great interior paleo- zoic sea. The filling up of this sea by sediment brought down by the rivers of the Archæan land now began. Living beings for the first time appear in abundance and with their appearance the Paleozoic era of geological time began. For an immensely long time during which the shoreline was pushed far out into the interior sea, only invertebrates, the lowest division of the animal kingdom, existed. Brachiopods, trilobites, gigantic molluscs, and delicate corals swarmed in the waters. This time is known as the Silurian Age, or Age of Invertebrates and in it most of the rocks of the northern part of our state were deposited. With the appearance of fishes, belonging to the vertebrates, to which man also belongs, the Silurian Age ends and the Devonian Age begins. During this age, the ancient shoreline was pushed still farther south and west, and the rocks of our county were formed. Gigantic fishes reigned in the waters, and land plants, allied to the pines and other conifers, first appeared. The Carboniferous Age succeeded the Devo- nian. It was in this age that the coal of the eastern states was formed. The first land animals also appeared. This age with the Paleozoic era was ended by a great revolution in which the Appalachian mountains were thrown up and the eastern part of the United States raised into dry land. The Paleo- zoic Era was now followed by the Mesozoic Era, the era of middle life. It comprises one age, the Age of Reptiles. The largest animals that ever ex- isted upon the earth lived in this age. Huge reptiles, 100 feet long and 20 feet high, lived upon the land and strange lizard-like monsters inhabited the waters. The bones of many of these strange creatures have been found in the rocks of Wyoming and Colorado and are now in the museum of Yale College. Birds and marsupials appeared, also modern land-plants. Many of the genera and even a few of the species of our common forest-trees are found. With the appearance of an entirely new class of animals, the mam- mal, the Mesozoic Era ends and the Cenezoic Era, with its one age, the Age of Mammals, was introduced. All the genera of our familiar animals made their appearance, and many gigantic forms, now extinct, existed. Many of these left their bones in the morasses and lake mud, which, hardening into rock, preserved them for the investigator of the present day. In the Qua- ternary period of this age great glaciers, streams and sheets of flowing ice came creeping down from the Canadian highlands and covered a large part of the northern United States. With the close of the glacial epoch, man appears and the history of the earth is nearly complete.

The sketch of historical geology has been given to show the age of the rock formations of our county and their place in the general scheme of classi- fication of the formation of the earth's crust. They belong mainly to the latter part of the Devonian Age but along the southern margin of the county some carboniferous rocks are found. The materials of which they are com- posed came, possibly, from the more ancient land to the north and east, being carried into the sea by rivers and gradually accumulating as sediment on the gently-sloping bottom. These subsequently hardened into rock, and,

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HISTORY OF ALLEGANY COUNTY, N. Y.

by a series of movements which culminated in the great upheaval at the end of the Paleozoic Era, by which the Appalachian mountains were formed, were elevated to their present position. By this elevation the divides which traverse the county were formed, and the direction of the drainage, form- erly south and west, was completely reversed, being now mainly north and east. No sooner did the rocks appear above the waters than frosts and chemical forces of decomposition attacked the surface, disintegrating it into soil; the rains descended and the waters, laden with the finer elements of the soil, gathered into streams, which now hold their ancient courses, and have eroded their valleys out of the rocks, left the hills between, and borne away the eroded material. As the result of the combined action of these forces during the enormous lapse of time since this region became dry land, probably thousands of feet of solid rock have been removed from above our highest hill tops.

The waters of the sea at the time of the depositing of our rocks, swarmed with life. Brachiopods were especially abundant. As these died their shells accumulated upon the bottom in immense numbers, were mixed with the sediment and the mass was afterward consolidated into a very hard impure sandstone. Many beds of this exist from a few inches to two or three feet thick and are composed almost entirely of the shells of spirifera disjuncta, a world-wide species, being found in England, France, and in the distant Himalaya mountains. This characteristicrock may be seen at almost any outcropping of strata in the county, and is the source of the shell rock so abundant on the surface. Thus for ages before the surface of Allegany county appeared as now, the work of erosion went on undisturbed, then, in comparative recent times, came the glacial epoch with its cold and ice. A vast sheet of ice descended from the north, and sweeping over this state gradually overspread large areas. Streams of ice first filled the valleys of this county and by their grinding action cut down the summits of the divide between the north and south flowing streams, thus forming the passes between Alfred and Andover, Friendship and Cuba, Cuba and Black Creek, the east and west notches near Richburg, etc. There is strong evidence that these passes were thus formed.

Slowly the ice rose until it covered all but the highest hilltops in the southern part of the county, By its action the hills were smoothed and rounded off, the surface rocks were ground into clay, mud, sand and large fragments and the whole intermixed composed the tenacious, impervious " hard-pan," which extends widely over the county except where it has been covered by later deposits. In many places the few inches of soil over- lying the hard-pan were formed by atmospheric agencies and by vegetation. The ice also brought from the far north immense quantities of sand, gravel, boulders of limestone, granite, gneiss, quartzite and other rocks. These, rounded and polished in their transportation, are often found in the county, but most of the material or " drift " was deposited along the melting mar- gin of the ice-sheet. The mounds and conical hills at Alfred Station and

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GEOLOGY AND PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY.

northward to Almond and westward through West Almond to Philips Creek are notable examples of glaciation. Smaller deposits exist at other locali- ties in the county, and probably all gravel and rounded boulder deposits at any considerable height above the streams are of glacial origin. Before the glacial epoch, the valleys were probably deeper and narrower than now. During that epoch and subsequently they were filled to their present high terrace levels by glacial detritus and material washed from the adjacent hills Thus were formed the broad valley flats which surpass in fertility the in- clined uplands and summits of the hills. Some of the valleys whose streams flow northward are partially filled by deep deposits of clay. The terra-cotta clay at Alfred, the clay in the valley of Knight's Creek, and that said to exist in the valley of Van Campen's Creek below Friendship, are examples. These clays were doubtless deposited in still waters, probably by lakes formed by ice-dams across the valleys. As the streams again began to flow after the ice disappeared from these valleys, they were in many places turned from their ancient courses and compelled to cut new channels out of solid rock. This is well shown by the Genesee at Portage. Its old channel was completely filled in the glacial epoch, and it has since cut out of the rock a new one several miles long and 300 feet deep. The same thing is shown on a smaller scale at Belmont where the river has cut a gorge of considerable depth and is still cutting it deeper in the rock. Vandermark's Creek near Scio, Van Campen's Creek near Belvidere, and Caneadea Creek near Rush- ford are other examples of such displacement.

The strata of the county dip slightly toward the south and southwest, so that each formation overlaps the one below it as shingles overlap on a roof. The angle of dip averages hardly one degree. On the northern margin of the county is the Portage sandstone, so called because it is well shown in the gorge at Portage. The upper layers of these strata are also exposed at the falls of the Canaseraga in Burns, and the line of their northern out-crop is marked by other cascades and by escarpments. Near the southern limits of Centerville, Hume, Grove, and Burns, the Portage sandstone passes beneath the rocks of the Chemung group and underlies them throughout the rest of the county. It is probably in this rock that the oil sands of the county are found.

The rest of the county, except the hilltops in the southern part, lies in the Chemung formation. This name is given to these rocks because they are extensively exposed along the Chemung river. Increasing in thickness from north to south with the dip they reach a thickness of 1,500 feet in southern Allegany. They consist mostly of thin-bedded sandstones, many of them highly argillaceous, alternating with layers of clay shale and are- naceous shale of all thicknesses. from less than an inch up to 30 or 40 feet. Two strata of sandstone from 10 to 20 feet thick are pierced in drilling for oil. A thick stratum of very pure clay shale is exposed at Alfred Station. The shales are generally green but change to brown on exposure. The sand- . stones contain mica also iron pyrites and oxide of manganese by which they

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HISTORY OF ALLEGANY COUNTY, N. Y.

are often discolored. The general character of the Chemung rocks may be seen at any of the many exposures in the county. Perhaps one of the best is in Caneadea Creek in Rushford and Caneadea. Others are at Rockville on Black Creek and on White Creek in Belfast, at Angelica, at Belmont, on Vandermark's Creek near Scio, at " the ledges " in Almond, and at several points in Alfred and in Independence.

Except in the southern part of the county the rocks of this group are highly fossiliferous. Besides spirifera disjuncta, there are many species of brachiopods, many species of lamelli branchs, a few species of orthoceratites and some sea-weeds. Some of the rocks contain scattered joints and frag- ments of crinoid stems with their radiating structure. But the rarest and most beautiful fossils found are the several species of dictyophyton, a genus of reticulated fossil sponges allied to the glass sponges of the present day, of which the beautiful euplectella is an example. These are found only in the Chemung rocks, and are perhaps in greater abundance in Allegany county than elsewhere. They have been found in Alfred, Almond, Wellsville, Genesee, Clarksville, Friendship, Wirt, and probably in most other towns. It was largely through the discoveries and efforts of the late President Allen, of Professor Larkin, and of E. B. Hall, of Wellsville, that these fossils were brought to the attention of the scientific world.

The high hill-tops in southern Allegany are capped with a red soil, which entirely disappears lower down the side. The rocks from which this red soil is derived belong to a different formation from the Chemung rocks which underlie them. They belong to the Catskill Group, a name given because of their great development in the region of the Catskill mountains where they are 3,000 feet thick. They thin out westward and are not men- tioned as occurring west of this county. It is thought they are the equiva- lent in America of the Old Red Sandstone of England and Scotland. The northern limit of the red soil seems to be near a line drawn from the north- ern border of Cuba to the south of Andover village. Probably none of the rock now remains in situ as far north as this, its former extension being indicated by the red soil into which it has been disintegrated. The exact limits of the formation have not been determined. It is said that the rock may be seen in places at Spring Mills in Independence and near Wellsville on the Genesee. The Portage, Chemung and Catskill formations belong to the Devonian Age.

At several points in the county are immense masses of coarse conglom- erate. These exist in great numbers and of large size at Rock City on the top of a high hill in Genesee, about three miles from the state line There is also a group near Petrolia in Scio. Many of those at Genesee are from 25 to 30 feet high, and their bases cover several square rods. Smaller fragments are found at other points. These interesting rocks are mainly composed of white quartzite pebbles (from the size of a goose-egg down to that of a pea) imbedded in a ground mass of coarse sand of the same mate- rial, the whole cemented together by iron or other cementing substance and

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by pressure. A few black pebbles also occur. The rock was used for mill- stones in the early days of settlement. The formation to which these iso- lated masses belong, and of which they are fragments that have escaped de- struction in the general course of denudation, is probably of the Carbonifer- ous Age and is the last formed rock of the county. It outcrops, south of Olean as Olean Rock City, and this, as a solid stratum, once extended north- wardly over our county. Another outcropping is at Panama in Chautauqua county, where it is called the Panama Conglomerate. It extends south to West Virginia, west to the Mississippi, and underlies the coal fields of Penn- sylvania. It is known to the drillers of the southern Pennsylvania oil regions as the " second mountain sand pebblerock " and Sharon conglome- rate; to the drillers of the northern field as the Olean conglomerate. A similar rock underlies the coal fields of England and Scotland where it is called "pudding stone " or " millstone grit." The material of this very ex- tensive formation was derived from an ancient stratum of quartzite of vast extent situated somewhere in the Archean area to the north or east. Into the swift-flowing rivers of that remote age fragments of the ancient rock were borne by the mountain streams, then rolled onward by their currents for all the many miles of their course, rounded into pebbles and ground into sand, and, at last, deposited along the shores of the vast sea that for untold ages rolled over the great central plain. So the geological and topographical features of Allegany county have been produced by the same slow-acting forces of nature that we may see in operation daily.

Of the mineral wealth of the county little need be said. The production of oil and natural gas is a leading industry in the southwestern part, and an extensive field is being developed in Andover and Independence. The laminated sandstone makes a good quality of flagging where it can be found of sufficient uniformity of thickness, and is quarried to some extent at Scio, Friendship, and in Centerville. Building stones suitable for coarse mason- ry are plentiful, but their coarseness and liability to be stained by oxids of iron and manganese makes them unfit for ornamental use. The argillaceous sand stone, on account of its hardness, would make a good material for road- making. The clays already mentioned furnish abundant material for brick and tile. This has been used to some extent for roofing tile and ornamental terra-cotta by the Celadon Terra Cotta Works at Alfred, but its use has been abandoned for that of shale. The extensive deposits of aluminous shale are except the oil rock, probably the most valuable source of mineral wealth in the county on account of the superior quality of brick and tile made from them. The Celadon Terra Cotta Works are using shale entirely for their roofing tile, and these are pronounced by competent judges to be supe- rior in appearance and equal in quality to any American or imported make. It seems probable that the shale of other parts of the county may prove equally valuable and become a basis of extensive industries.

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A Centennial Memorial History of Allegany county, New York, Part 15

Author: Minard, John Stearns, 1834-1920; Merrill, Georgia Drew Publication date: 1896 Publisher: Alfred, N.Y., W. A. Fergusson & co. Number of Pages: 1102

Author: Minard, John Stearns, 1834-1920; Merrill, Georgia Drew
Publication date: 1896
Publisher: Alfred, N.Y., W. A. Fergusson & co.
Number of Pages: 1102