USA > New York > Genesee County > History of the Genesee country (western New York) comprising the counties of Allegany, Cattaraugus, Chautauqua, Chemung, Erie, Genesee, Livingston, Monroe, Niagara, Ontario, Orleans, Schuyler, Steuben, Wayne, Wyoming and Yates, Volume I > Part 2
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83
Utica and Lorraine dark shales 598
Trenton gray limestone
954
Ordovician
Mohawkian
Black River dark limestone
134
Lowville and Chazy limestone
Beekmantown limestone
?
Canadian
Total feet 6,977
This table should be compared with the map of outcrops, or areal geology, plate 1, and with the diagram of successive strata, plate 2.
A. ERA OF SUBMERGENCE AND SEDIMENTATION. CAMBRIAN PERIOD.
The condition of western New York during the immensely long time previous to the Paleozoic Era is unknown. Possibly it
Oriskanian
Helderbergian
Cayugan (Salina)
Niagaran
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
was dry land, contributing materials for deposits in neighboring submerged areas. The rocks of pre-Paleozoic time are wide- spread in Canada, and are represented in New York in the Adirondack highlands and in the lower Hudson Valley. It is possible that Proterozoic strata lie deep beneath our Ordovician, which would imply submergence. Deep drilling, to depth much over 3,000 feet, is the only way to secure knowledge on this matter.
For Cambrian time, the opening period of the Paleozoic, we have a probable negative record. Across Lake Ontario in Canada the Cambrian is wanting, and it does not clearly appear in the record of the deep Rochester well (paper No. 2). The absence of Cambrian rocks would indicate either (1) that our region was above the sea in Cambrian time, or (2) that if deposits were made in submergence they were eroded during later uplift.
Some part of northern New York was submerged in the Cambrian, as proven by the Potsdam sandstone1 in the St. Law- rence Valley and this and other strata in the Champlain Valley.
The most interesting element in geologic history is the evolu- tion of life :- plants and animals, and the Cambrian fauna is of special interest, because it is the most ancient record of life which has been clearly preserved. We find no evidence of land, or air- breathing, animals in the Cambrian rocks, but the seas were swarming with invertebrate life of many kinds and of high de- velopment. A characteristic form of the time is a group of crus- taceans, the Trilobites, which had their culmination in this period and became extinct in the Paleozoic. The living crustaceans which most resemble the ancient trilobite are the "Horseshoe Crabs" (Limulus) of our seashores, and the little "Sow-Bugs" of the land. Any textbook of geology will describe and illustrate these and other fossils.
The Cambrian fossils represent probably more than one-half of the evolution of animal life from its simplest forms. And this suggests that the length of time previous to the Cambrian, during which the physical conditions were favorable for oceanic life, was much longer than all the scores of millions of years which have elapsed since. The alteration (metamorphism) of the very
1 A sample of the red Potsdam, so largely used in northern New York, may be seen in the entrance of the State Armory on Main Street East, in Rochester.
LOWER FALL OF THE GENESEE RIVER, ROCHESTER CANYON (Plate 8) View looking south, from near the Driving Park Avenue bridge.
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ROCHESTER CANYON, GENESEE RIVER (Plates 9) Upper view: Looking south toward Driving Park Avenue bridge. Lower view: Looking south from Seneca Park drive.
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
ancient rocks has destroyed the contained fossils, and the early stages of life are forever lost.
ORDOVICIAN PERIOD.
The three great time periods subsequent to the Cambrian are well recorded in the Genesee region, but the Ordovician (old Lower Silurian) is mostly buried and invisible. According to the present classification of the rock strata the only portion of the Ordovician that is visible in our region is about 50 feet of the latest beds. This is seen in the Rochester canyon of the Genesee River below the lower falls. Here the inferior half of the canyon walls is red sandstone and shale. The upper 50 feet is Medina, and the lower 50 feet, the bottom of the visible section, is now regarded as the top of the Ordovician, and named Queenston, from the exposure on the Niagara River. Some geologists call it Richmond, from its large occurrence in Indiana.
The upper limit, or the plane of separation from the over- lying Silurian strata, is not well marked, but is somewhat arbi- trarily taken as the bottom of the heavy beds of red Medina sand- stone, which project conspicuously on the east wall of the canyon north of Driving Park Avenue Bridge (plate 6). The red shales and sandstone which appear along the Ontario shore from Niagara eastward toward Oswego are Queenston, or upper Ordo- vician. Beneath Rochester the drill found 1,025 feet of these red shales.
Below the red Queenston shales are some 83 feet of gray sandstone, which are correlated with those that appear on the lake shore at Oswego. Beneath the Oswego sandstone is about 600 feet of fine-grained, dark shale, believed to correspond to the dark shale in the Mohawk Valley, and named Utica. Below the Utica shale is nearly 1,000 feet of gray limestone, the Tren- ton. This is underlain by 134 feet of dark limestones, the Black River and lower beds. Beneath this immense thickness of lime- stone the nature and the correlation of the few feet of quartzose rocks are not determined.
The history of the Genesee region in Ordovician time is evi- dent, in a general way, from study of the rock section, briefly described above. It is certain that for a vast length of time this region was submerged, or oceanic, being part of a widespread
36
HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
epicontinental sea. During the earlier part of the Ordovician the region was under open sea. No dry land was near enough to supply sand or clay, and in the pure salt waters the lime- secreting organisms flourished in abundance, supplying the material for over 1,100 feet of slowly accumulating limestone. Great numbers of the many kinds of animals which then lived in the sea are preserved in their hard parts. The earliest recognized remains of fish, or at least related forms, occur in rock of Trenton age in Colorado.
The close of the Trenton limestone epoch was due to change in the geography of this part of the continent, which exposed the area of western New York to the inwash of land waste. The clay swept in by the sea currents made the water unfavorable for coral and other lime-secreting animals, and the deposition of limestone was changed to that of clay rock or shale. The great thickness of nearly black shale must have required an enormous length of time. The fossils show not only evolutionary progress but adaptation to the muddy waters.
The Ordovician limestones and shales are very widely de- veloped, eastward to the Hudson and westward through the Mis- sissippi basin, thus indicating that the Genesee region was part of extended marine conditions. The source of the clay supply, or the wasting dry land, was, for this region, probably on the north.
SILURIAN PERIOD.
(Plate 3.)
This very interesting division of old geologic time has its type record in the Genesee Valley. The Rochester canyon is the classic section, made such by James Hall in his famous report on this district, published in 1843 (paper No. 1). The Rochester canyon with its display of the three classes of sedimentary rocks, richly colored and in distinct groups, is one of the handsomest rock sections known. The succession, passing upward, begins with the red Medina sandstone and shale, capped with three feet of white Thorold sandstone. The Clinton strata include four dis- tinct divisions, two shales and two limestones. The lower shale, 24 feet thick, is of an olive-green color, and the upper shale, of
MEDINA SANDSTONE (Plates 10) Upper view: Brady's quarry at Albion, in 1899. Lower view: Horan's quarry at Medina, in 1899.
CORALLINE REEF IN CLINTON STRATA, NIAGARA GORGE (Plate 11) The view is a cross-section of the reef, which is an up-growth of the subjacent limestone, into the overlying shale. The lime-secreting organisms survived for a time the rain of clay particles, which finally destroyed the life.
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
similar thickness, is green and purple. (See plate 6, and paper No. 18.) Above the Clinton the dark gray Rochester shale has a thickness of about 80 feet. The top of the canyon is in the lower beds of the Lockport, and the Lockport and Guelph magnesian limestones (dolomite) underlie the city and appear in the bed of the river southward to South Park.
The three Rochester cataracts, equivalent to the single fall at Niagara over similar strata, are an effect of hard strata over- lying weaker ones. The crest of the lower falls (plate 8) is the hard "gray band" of the Thorold sandstone. The middle falls, now obscured by dam and structures, is on the lower of the two Clinton limestones, while the upper fall is produced on the lower, hard beds of the Lockport limestone, which is underlain by 80 feet of Rochester shale (plates 2, 7).
The Rochester shale is wholly displayed in one-half mile of the canyon below the upper falls. Wide areas of this formation carry the name of Rochester into the arctic region of America (plate 3, map 2).
Rochester City is fortunate in having a solid foundation in. the Lockport (Niagara) dolomite. The upper beds are more highly magnesian, and in the many solution cavities are found a. great variety of minerals in beautiful crystals, as dolomite, gyp- sum, sphalerite, galenite, pyrite, fluorite, quartz, etc. (paper 25). These cavities and the contained minerals are an effect of leach- ing waters and concentration of substances by the weathering" and removal of one or two thousand feet of formerly overlying rock. At Lockport one bed is a buried coral reef.
In succession above the Lockport occur the Salina shales, in several groups, the upper members containing thick beds of salt. and gypsum. The Bertie is a clayey limestone, named from a. Canadian locality.
Some of the Silurian strata may be seen in almost any stream. ravine in the wide belt of country facing Lake Ontario.
The history of the Silurian is more varied than the Ordo- vician, due to the more rapid changes in the geography and physi- cal conditions of this part of the continent, and probably these. were caused by up-and-down movements of the land surface. The story begins with shallow-water conditions in western New York, producing the sands and sand-reefs of the Medina (plate:
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
10), so richly stored with the beautiful inscriptions produced by fickle winds and waves of that ancient time. The character- istic fossil of the Medina is the work of marine worms that bur- rowed in the sand. The filling, or casts, of the more common burrows are named Arthrophycus (jointed sea-weed) because they were at first thought to be impressions of fucoids.
The Clinton strata (plate 6) of two distinct shales and two limestones, represent sharply changing sea conditions. Such relatively rapid alternations of lime and clay deposition are un- usual, and must necessarily be local. Through western and cen- tral New York the Clinton is very variable and the Rochester section is peculiar. When the sea currents reaching this locality came from some neighboring land area the land-derived silt that was swept in produced the shale. Some change in the geography of this part of the continent and change in direction of the cur- rents brought in detritus from some coral reef or other lime- producing source, and limestone was accumulated.
The Rochester shale, the Lockport dolomite and the thick Salina shales represent variable conditions, but not so rapidly changing as the Clinton time.
At the base of the lower limestone of the Rochester Clinton is a foot of red iron ore, or hematite, shown in plate 5. Eastward this ore occurs at different levels or horizons in the Clinton, and so abundantly as to be an important supply of iron. The precise manner of its origin is yet uncertain.
While the present surface rock at Rochester is the Lockport dolomite (plate 12) and southward is the Salina shale, it must not be supposed that these represent the original land surface, when the region was finally and permanently lifted out of the oceanic waters. Atmospheric decay and rain and stream erosion have eaten deeply into the rock strata. At Rochester it is esti- mated that over 1,000 feet, and possibly 2,000 feet of rock have been removed. Rocks which were once deeply buried are now exposed at the surface. This subject will be considered later.
As the salt and gypsum of the Salina strata are confidently believed to have been formed as precipitates in confined bodies of evaporating salt water (plate 3, map 4) they are regarded as proofs of arid climate, and therefore of desert conditions over considerable areas of the continent. This is one of the evidences . that the climate was variable in different parts of the world in
-
LOCKPORT LIMESTONE (Plates 12)
Upper view: Quarry west of Lockport, in 1899. Lower view: Quarry on North Goodman Street, Rochester, 1899. The overlying mantle of glacial drift shows clearly.
ONONDAGA LIMESTONE (Plates 13)
Upper view: Gehre's quarry, at Buffalo, 1899. Lower view: Cut for Lehigh Valley Railroad, one-half mile northwest of Honeoye Falls, 1899. Two men are pomung out the break in the rock series that rep. esents ine lower Devonian of the Syracuse region. Above the break is Onondaga, below is Salina.
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
Paleozoic time, as it is today; and also that world climate has greatly varied throughout all of geologic time.
Professor Charles Schuchert has depicted nine stages in the changing paleogeography of Silurian time, as he conceives it, and four of them are reproduced here as plate 3, by his kind permis- sion. Four stages of his Devonian are shown in plate 4.
GREAT EROSION INTERVAL.
Above the Salina formation in western New York is a dis- continuity or break (disconformity) in the rock succession, for the reason that the area was for a long time above the ocean level, as shown in plate 4, map 1. This erosion interval covers the time of the Lower Devonian as well as the later Silurian. Dur- ing that time with no record left in our area a great thickness of rock was deposited in central and eastern New York and other parts of the continent. Of the beds missing here the impure limestones, Rosendale, Cobleskill, Rondout and Manlius, are re- garded as the top of the Silurian system, while the Helderberg limestones are the bottom of the Devonian. Above the Helder- berg formation lies the Oriskany sandstone, 60 feet thick and the Esopus-Schoharie group of shales and grits.
Some idea of the lapse of time represented by this inconspicu- ous break in our record may be had when we learn that at Gaspe the Helderberg limestones are 1,000 feet thick, and that the Oriskany is represented by limestones of 800 feet thickness.
We do not know what amount of these several formations may have been deposited here and subsequently eroded. The only remnants are traces and thin lenses of Oriskany sand, and sometimes a seam of greenish mud along the line of the discon- formity. The break in the rock series, or the disconformity, is indicated in plate 13, figure 2, by the two men in the photograph.
DEVONIAN PERIOD.
(Plate 4.)
Overlying the gap in the record described above is the Onon- daga limestone (plate 13), which is our lowest Devonian, but not the lowest in other districts. This represents widespread
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
marine conditions, and its coral reefs are evidence that the wa- ters were warm and pure. The buried coral masses may be seen at Lime Rock, east of Leroy. On the belt of outcrop of this limestone, from Buffalo to Syracuse, are some of the best upland farms. Being pure calcite, except for the masses of flint, this limestone has been much used for burnt lime, and is now ground for fertilizer.
With the abundance of marine life, corals, crinoids and mol- lusks, which produced the lime skeletons that were triturated and distributed to form the rock, there also lived a profusion of other animals, and plants, which secreted silica and supplied the material for the black flint. In some places this flint exceeds the lime in amount. The old name "Corniferous" for the lime- stone, referred to the flint or "hornstone".
The Onondaga, about 90 feet thick in the Genesee Valley, thickens westward to nearly 200 feet at Buffalo. It is abruptly overlain by the black Marcellus shale, which thickens eastward and replaces the limestone. This shale was a black mud swept in from some land area on the east. The limestone at Stafford, Genesee County, is a layer interbedded in Marcellus shale, being only a finger or projection from the thick Onondaga on the west.
Above the Marcellus, in the vertical series, and southward in the areal distribution at the surface, is a great series of shales and sandstones, with some limey layers, all classed as Hamilton. The thin limestone beds are slender prolongations from the great limestone series in the western states which replaces the shales just as the Onondaga there replaces the Marcellus.
The northern and the deeper portions of the valleys of the Finger Lakes, with the Genesee River and streams farther west, expose the Hamilton beds. With their regular and thin bedding, due to considerable depth of water, the Hamilton sandstones yield excellent flagstones, but are now largely replaced by cement.
In central New York 25 feet of limestone, called Tully, lies on the Hamilton beds. In the Genesee region the Tully is repre- sented by a thin and inconspicuous layer of iron pyrites, marking the unrecorded interval. A good locality for observing the pyrite (Tully) zone is in the bed of Fall Brook, two miles south of Geneseo, and east of the railroad. Overlying the pyritiferous layer at this point are 83 feet of black Genesee shale, the next formation in the upward succession.
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6
VIEWS IN PORTAGE CANYON (Plates 14)
1. Middle falls. 2. Below the middle falls, looking downstream. 3. Upper drop of lower falls. 4. Cathedral rock, below the lower falls. 5. In the flume, below the lower falls, 6. Ravine below the lower falls and flume,
*
UPPER FALL IN PORTAGE CANYON, GENESEE RIVER (Plate 15)
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
Above the Genesee shale, usually 100 feet or less in thickness, lie the Portage shales and sandstones, of great thickness. These are named from the canyon of the Genesee River where the rocks are handsomely displayed in three cataracts (plates 14-17). Watkins Glen (plate 20) and other ravines in the Seneca Valley, along with those at Ithaca and about the head of the Cayuga Valley, are in the Portage. All the deep valleys of western New York and the remarkable series of parallel valleys in central New York have been carved by atmosphere and stream out of the great plateau formed of Devonian strata.
Rising above the Portage, and lying southward, are the Che- mung shaley sandstones, 1,200 feet thick, which cap the highlands of the southern part of western New York, over 2,000 feet alti- tude. These beds, replaced eastward by the Catskill sandstones, close the long-time Devonian in New York.
The long era of marine submergence, with the deposition of perhaps 7,000 feet of mostly oceanic deposits, ended for New York with the close of the Chemung. A later rock of singular character is a land deposit, and its description belongs in a later chapter.
SUMMARY ; LIFE HISTORY.
The reader will now appreciate the extremely long time recorded in the rocks of the Genesee section, and the great changes in geography and physical conditions during the tens of millions of years represented. Yet the strata do not represent nearly all of the duration, for there are long-time lapses or gaps in the rock-record, due to elevation which prevented deposition or caused subsequent erosion. As the strata are parallel and the breaks inconspicuous or even imperceptible probably some minor ones have not been recognized. The best evidence is found by careful comparison of detailed vertical sections at separated lo- calities. Only one great erosion interval is noted in the table, page 29.
Students of geologic history have tried to depict the changing areas of land and sea during the ancient periods. Eight of the suggestive maps from an extended series by Professor Charles Schuchert2 are reproduced here as plates 3 and 4.
2 Paleogeography of North America. Bulletin of the Geological Society of America. Vol. 20, 1910, pages 427-606; and Text Book of Geology, Part 2, by Pirsson & Schuchert.
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
The southerly trend in position of the successive deposits dur- ing the Paleozoic indicates that the sea margins were retreating or shifting southward. Evidently this was caused by the pre- vailing rise or uplift of the land on the north. The Ontario dis- trict may have been considerably elevated while the southern part of the state was yet submerged in the epicontinental seas.
The organic history, or the story of evolution of life, is hu- manly more important and interesting. All of our rocks fall within one of the great time divisions, the Paleozoic, ancient-life time. At the beginning of the Paleozoic no vertebrate (back- boned) animals existed, but the greater groups of the inverte- brates were all represented. Mollusks and crustaceans were highly developed. The trilobites of the Cambrian have been men- tioned.
Apparently the earlier animals were all aquatic, or water- breathers. But insects appeared in the Devonian along with abundance of land plants. Perhaps some of the more venture- some crustacea crept out on the land to nibble at the vegetation, and so acquired the faculty of taking oxygen from the air instead of from the water, as some crabs do today. If so, these were the earliest land inhabitants of the Genesee Country.
The fishes of the Devonian were so abundant and varied that the period has been called the age of fishes. Not that they were at their maximum, for they have their greatest development to- day, but that fishes were the well-developed new group in the life-evolution. Devonian fishes included representatives of a yet-living group of enameled fish, the ganoids (sturgeon and gar-pike), of the sharks, and of the so-called lung-fishes (dipnoi). There were also some huge armored fishes over 20 feet long (Dinichthys), which soon passed out. The singular fish-forms, but not true fishes, which began in the Ordovician were charac- teristic of the Devonian, but then disappeared.
All the Devonian fishes had cartilaginous skeletons, even though many carried heavy bone or enamel armor. No repre- sentatives of the prevailing modern fishes with bony skeletons (teleosts) lived in the Devonian, nor until the early Mesozoic, millions of years later. The later evolution of marine life took place while New York was above the sea, and developing by erosion its superb physiographic features.
MIDDLE FALL IN PORTAGE CANYON, GENESEE RIVER (Plate 16)
T
2
3
8
VIEWS IN PORTAGE AND MT. MORRIS CANYONS, GENESEE RIVER (Plates 17) 1. Upper falls at Portage. 2. View below middle falls, looking south. 3. Looking north, downstream, below lower fall. 4. Mt. Morris canyon, ("High Banks"), looking north. 5. East bank of Mt. Morris canyon below the "Hog Back." 6. Genesee shale at mouth of the Mt. Morris canyon.
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HISTORY OF THE GENESEE COUNTRY
A suggestion of amphibians, the connecting link between fish and reptile, is found in a single footprint in the Chemung.
Land plants flourished in the Devonian, of several orders, as ferns, lycopods and gymnosperms (conifers), and of such ad- vanced rank that it appears certain their ancestors lived far back in Silurian or even in Ordovician time. The prevailing marine deposits of those earlier periods did not favor preserva- tion of land life. It is an interesting fact that the ancestors of our most splendid and useful forest trees, the conifers, began so far back in time, much antedating all other forest flora.
The detailed story of the evolution of life forms may be read in any modern text-book of geology.
In the later Devonian strata, Hamilton and Chemung are occasional layers of dark-colored carbonaceous or peaty matter, and even some very thin seams of true coal. These have caused people to expect workable coal and to spend fortunes in the vain search. Nowhere in the world are valuable coal beds found in rocks as old as the Devonian. Biologic and geologic conditions were not favorable until Mississippian time.
B. ERA OF EXPOSURE AND EROSION.
THE OLEAN CONGLOMERATE.
A few hills in the southwestern corner of the state, in Catta- raugus and Chautauqua counties, are capped with an unusual rock of white quartz pebbles known as the Olean conglomerate. The famous locality, Rock City (plate 21), just over the line in Penn- sylvania, displays the same formation. This rock is regarded as the equivalent of the very thick (over 1,000 feet) conglomerate in east-central Pennsylvania, known as the Pottsville. In time it is early Pennsylvanian. Referring to the table of rock succes- sion it will be seen that the long Mississippian period has left no record in our state, and this conglomerate was laid long after marine conditions ceased in New York, and therefore belongs in the subsequent (and present) era of exposure to the air.
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