USA > Ohio > Lorain County > History of Lorain County, Ohio > Part 4
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1.039
Sheffield
973
Elyria City
3,038
Wellington township.
610
Grafton
960
Wellington borough 1,281
Total
30,308
* GEOLOGY.
There is perhaps no subject at the present . time that excites a deeper interest among thinking and scientific minds than the science of Geology. Several
reasons may be given for this, one of which is that it is the newest among all the sciences; another is that it upsets all of our old preconceived notions as to the age of the world. Whereas we had been tanght that it was almost heresy to believe that the world was more than six thousand years old, and that Moses' account of the creation in its six solar days of twenty-four hours each was literally correct, geology has proven beyond a doubt that it has been as many millions or even more years in existence, and that it was countless ages before it was prepared for, or even was possible for man to have lived upon it. Hence at first many divines were found opposing this new science with its new theories.
These controversies have been fraught with very much good. They have laid the foundation for deeper thought and investigation, and now, instead of lift- ing up hands with holy horror at the teachings of this great geological book, we find our most eminent divines quoting it as anthority to substantiate just what at first they supposed it disproved.
We have neither space nor time to go back over these old controverted grounds, whose errors, like cobwebs, are fast being brushed away by the hand of time as new light breaks in upon the intelligent mind. Neither have we time to open ont this grand old book of nature, and commence at the beginning, every page of which shines like letters in gold, telling of the great Creator's power and goodness; how that, step by step. for millions of years, the earth was being fitted and prepared for the abode and happiness of man. (We use the term " millions of years " not that geological time can be counted or expressed in years, but this term, perhaps, gives us the best idea of the lapse of ages. ) But we must begin almost at the very ending and only study a portion of that chapter that relates to our immediate surroundings.
We do not propose, therefore, in this brief chapter, to take the reader all over the world to teach geology, but shall contine ourself to Lorain county and that which pertains to and affects it.
Nearly every farm in the county has material enough upon it to fill pages with interesting matter. and if the geology of Lorain county was fully written up it would more than till every page of this beautiful history. I shall, therefore, merely give an outline, and contine myself to what I have seen and what the rocks teach us. This will of necessity take us back into the far-away ages of the past when there was no human eye to behold the beauties in the morning dawn of creation (no less beautiful then than now), nor human hand to record their history; and yet the everlasting rocks have left their record as plainly and distinctly marked as if "graven with an iron pen." The geologist reads these " footprints of the Creator " with clearness and just as much assurance as the astronomer marks the course of the stars, or the historian records the events of a nation.
Geology being the newest of all the sciences. it is very probable that some of the theories now held by
* By Jay Terrell.
827.291
5,286
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HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.
our leading scientists will have to be abandoned as new light breaks in with the lapse of time. It woukd indeed show but little progress and be very strange if this were not the case. It behooves us, therefore, to be very careful about adopting new theories until we are well assured that they are based upon solid foun- dation, or rather solid rock. I hold it as a cardinal principle that theories can always afford to wait until fully tested and facts are brought to prove the validity of their claims. There are, however, some theories in geology that must of necessity be founded on negative proof. For example: the great Ohio fossil fishes are said to have had no seales from the fact that none have ever yet been found with their remains. This, coupled with the fact that their structure was such that they seemed not to have needed scales, is deemed sntlicient to establish the theory that they had none, although it is based upon negative testimony.
In some respects the study of geology has been with me a life work, and for many years some portion of each year has been devoted to practical field work. In Canada, and on the islands of Lake Erie; in Ohio, and other States; in summer, under broiling suns; in rain and storms; in winter, amid snow and ice,-have I tried faithfully to work out these grand problems of nature; and yet how little do we know of the great Creator's power and purposes. Evidently the world has passed through a thousand changes, all seemingly for the benefit of the last crowning act of creation- man.
We will now take up the geology of Lorain county in detail, beginning with the clay drift, the first formation or surface deposit, and so step by step, along down to the Huron shale, the lowest exposed deposit in the county.
The mechanical force which distributed this wide- spread drift, we will speak of further on, under its proper head, "Glaciers." The soil which rests im- mediately upon this drift, or clay-bed, and which we plow and cultivate, is of vegetable origin and produced by the slow process of the decomposition of vegetable matter. It is usually only a few inches in thickness over the surface except where it has accumulated on the lower lands, either by the wash from the higher lands or water standing a sufficient length of time to collect leaves, mosses, etc., which eventually became swamps.
This soil although quite thin, nevertheless bears the evidence of having been ages in its accumulation, ere it was able to sustain the first seanty growth of forest trees. JJust what that first growth of forest trees iu Lorain county was, we are unable definitely to deter- mine; but from drift-wood which is more or less found under all our ridges, and some other "foot-prints," we are led to conclude, that our first forest trees belonged to the pine or cedar family.
For several years I have been led to believe that one race of trees succeeded another in the cycles of time; that is, they came in the order in which the climate and soil are prepared for, and adapted to receive them. This we know to be true of animals ; one race becomes
extinct and another follows in its course and fakes its place. As changes are constantly going on in the world, new beings are created to meet these changes, and the old ones, that can no longer exist under the new order of things pass away. These climatic and other changes, humanly speaking, are very slow: so slow, that to us they are not perceptible. To us there seems to be a profound rest; but these changes are just as sure and certain as summer and winter; sunrise and sunset.
The evidence of the succession of tree-growth is very clearly shown on Point-au-Pelee, one of the islands of Lake Erie. All over the higher lands, the soil is literally filled with red cedar roots, showing conclusively that there once existed on this island a dense growth of this species of conifers. These roots, lying as they do, intermixed with the hard clay drift, are as nearly imperishable as almost any thing can be, except it be the "everlasting rocks."
In all probability this was the first tree or shrub (it could only have been a shrub in its incipient stages) that took possession of the soil, and it must have hekt complete possession for a long period of time, until their slowly decaying leaves, with other scanty vege- tation ultimately produced a soil sufficient for the sustenance of other trees, and a more rank vegetation. Around the margin of the island, on the almost barren sandy beach, I found the red cedar still flourish- ing where scarcely anything else could grow. These cedars must have been "monarchs of all they sur- veyed" for tens of thousands of years, until they slowly gave place to the growth of another class of trees, for which the accumulated soil of ages became especially adapted.
The next growth in the succession we find were truly " monarchs of the forest," great oaks. No such trees are now growing upon the island, nor indeed have been for many generations in the past, but their prostrate decaying bodies he half buried beneath the soil of centuries, and are scattered here and there over the surface, among the thickly wooded timber of the present forest. As I stepped upon some of these trees, they would sink beneath my feet, as nothing but their moss-covered bark holts them together. Probably within the present generation they will entirely disappear, leaving no trace behind them as evidence of their having once existed.
No doubt there is many a missing link in the long chain of geological events, which, if we had them all connected together, we could read the sequences of time much plainer than we can now. Nevertheless there is still enough left to give us a tolerably correct idea of the progressive stages in the earth's history since the dawn of creation. A mixed growth of timber now covers the island, such as oak, hickory, ash, maple, ete. 1 give this as an illustration, to prove the succession of forest trees and the ages of time that must have elapsed, from the deposition of these drift clay-beds, until they accumulated a suf- ficient soil to sustain such a mass of vegetation as that
20
HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.
which now everywhere meets our gaze. I am of the opinion that the earth is, and always has been ocen- pied at each successive period with the highest type of life, both animal and vegetable, that the conditions will allow.
The drift formation of Lorain county, is mostly the product of the Huron and Erie shales, intermixed with other material that has been transported long distances by the action of ice. These shales have been plowed, torn up, crushed, and massed together. by the plow-share of the Almighty: an agency that the All-wise Father has used to fit and prepare this part of his heritage for the habitation of man-a power that has plowed and planed down mountains into valleys, and leveled the whole into vast plains. Such a power is, and only can be, immense fields of iee in the form of glaciers.
That these glaciers existed on the North American continent at one period in the far-away-past, and that they were the direct canse of the distribution of our clay-beds there can now be no reasonable doubt. These clays are more or less filled with fragments of lime, granite, quartz, gneiss, green stone and other pebbles, all foreign material, brought down from the monn- tain-side, and transported hundreds of miles from their place of origin-mixed and intermixed with these shales which were so evenly distributed over the un- derlying rocks.
The dairy-farmers of Lorain county owe to these shales, which were thus ground up and mixed to- gether, their peculiar clay soil,-hard, tenacious, unworkable when wet, but when well drained, and seeded, nothing can excel it for grazing and dairying purposes. Along the border of the lake, especially in Avon and Sheffield, this soil is peculiarly adapted to grape culture; and here may be seen many beautiful vineyards, from which hundreds of tons of grapes are annually gathered and shipped to all parts of the country.
There is perhaps no part of the county where the drift is so well shown as on the lake shore in Sheffield township. Here commences a long line of beach which extends ahnost to Vermillion. The direct. cause of this beach is that the glacier dipped deeper into the roek here than farther cast, tearing up the hard shale to a considerable depth below the present surface of the lake, leaving the clay banks to come down to the water's edge. Farther cast the shale being above the water, forms a bluff bank (we call it iron-bound shore) against which the waves almost constantly dash. At the eastern end of this beach the banks are about eighteen feet high. About half way from top to bottom the clay drift lies directly upon the Huron shale; the line of demarkation be- tween the two is as well defined as would be one board lying upon another. Farther on we find the shales torn from their bed and the upper portion thoroughly mixed and incorporated with the lower stratum, or base of the clay. The lower portion of the shale that was torn from the rock, was broken up, ground and
shoved along, but still remained unmixed with the clay above, and unexposed to atmospheric changes; it therefore remains a stratum of broken shale between the clay and the solid rock below.
Still farther on we find where, in some way, the ice- field got a foot-hold in a seam in the rock and moved the whole mass bodily to the west several feet, making quite a large fissure; then, passing on over, filled this fissure to its very bottom with elay-mud and gravel. This great ice-field was working westward, and all through Sheffield it was on a downward grade: that is, working deeper into the rock.
Just before it reached the point where Lake Breeze is now situated. (it wasn't Lake Breeze then, ) it plowed still deeper into the rock and soon dipped below the surface of the lake (it wasn't lake then either), and did not rise again above the present water level until it reached almost to Vermillion in Erie county.
The glacial action in this drift formation is as readily traced along this lake shore beach as may be the course of a river, and its "foot-prints " are as plain and unmistakable as those of a man or a horse. No written record can be plainer or more easily studied, than can be the drift along this lake line. While so many scientific facts are left in such obseurity that it takes a long life of patient toil and research to comprehend only a few facts, here the drift which has been so little understood in the past is laid bare before us like a panoramic view, so that we may study it at our will.
There is no department in the science of geology that has been heretofore so little understood as the drift formation. This is accounted for by the fact that it was produced by different causes and at widely separated periods of time. We are now coming to the light, and as we learn to classify these periods and depositions of drift, instead of massing them together into one general deposit. we are better able to under- stand their formations.
BOULDERS.
The erratie rocks. which we call boulders or " hard heads," that are so profusely distributed over the clay soil of Lorain county, are from beds of different deposits. They are composed of granite, quartzite, diorite, crystalline lime-stone, gneiss, silician slate, ete. Although of different formations and deposits, they are all classed with and belong to the Eozoie age of the world. It was called Azoic (that is, " without life ") until within a few years. Although there have been no fossils found in the Eozoic rocks, it is now very generally beiieved among geologists and scientific men that even in this very remote period in the earth's history there did exist some of the lower forms of animal and vegetable life. This, we think, is clearly proven by the abundance of graphite, iron and lime- stone that is found in these rocks, each of which is the direct prodnet of either animal or vegetable or- ganisms: graphite and iron are the products of the carbon of plants. When you pick up a piece of native
21
HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.
iron ore to examine it, bear in mind that it was not produced like lava, by passing through a melting pro- cess, but that it is of vegetable origin. Although it may have, as all our Lake Superior ore has, passed through this metamorphic process, yet heat has noth- ing to do with its origin as iron, but was merely an after result of internal disturbances.
Limestone is almost wholly made up from the shells and minute skeletons of marine organisms that have the power of secreting the carbonate of lime which forms their shells. We have no reason to believe that iron or limestone were produced in the Eozoie age by any different process than it is now.
We find these rocks stratified, and thit they were originally deposited in even horizontal beds, but have since been metamorphosed by heat, and are now much displaced and broken up by upheavals and internal forces. They are divided into two groups-upper and lower-called Huronian and Laurentian: Huronian, from their fine exposure on the north of Lake Huron; Laurentian, from the lower St. Lawrence region, where these rocks abound. They are the surface rock over a broad belt of country, extending from Labrador, on the east, to Lake Superior, and then stretching away northward to the Arctic Sea.
The Adirondae Mountains, although ontside of this belt, belong to the same epoch and formation, and were raised above the oceen at the same time. They are called the oldest rocks in the world, and deservedly so; for they are the oldest surface rocks now known, and never have been submerged since they were first raised above the old eozoic ocean. While most parts of our continent have been raised above the sea, only to be submerged again, (and this occurring many times, as each stratified formation plainly testifies. ) yet these old cozoic rocks have proudly held their giant heads above the surrounding ocean almost from the time that the sun first penetrated the thick elond of darkness that surrounded the earth, when God said, " Let there be light; and there was light."
We call the eastern continent the Old Workl; but. the Adirondac monntains of New York, the region around Lake Superior and the Ozarks, of Missouri, are ages older than any land on that continent. The igneons rocks which underly these metamorphic rocks are of course much older than they; but all that we know about them is by their being thrown to the surface by eruptions, as they are nowhere found exposed on the surface. They have passed through inconceivable heat, first in the gaseous and then in the molten state, and were the first rocks formed by the cooling of the earth's surface, and are therefore not stratitied. They belong to that age of the world of which they are the only record. We find these fused roeks frequently among our erraties of the iceberg drift.
Sir William Logan, an eminent Canadian geologist, estimates the cozoic rocks in Canada to be about forty- seven thousand feet in thickness. When we consider that all this vast rock formation was the accumulation
from the destruction and slow wearing away process of an older continent, and that older continent perhaps from the debris of one still older, we can form but a faint conception of the myriads of ages that have passed away since "in the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."
The boulders were broken and torn from these old cozoic rocks by glaciers coming down from the moun- tainous region of the north. As they shoved them- selves out into this great inland sea of fresh water, which had been formed by the scooping out of the lake basin, they were broken up and floated ont to sca. No longer traveling by land and grasping in their iey arms massive boulders and all other material that lay in their course; now they are icebergs, trav- ersing the sea and carrying their boulders, sand. gravel and other debris whithersoever the wind drives them. We therefore call the boulders a part of the iceberg drift, as they were deposited by icebergs and not by glaciers.
The surface clay of Lorain county is glacial drift, and was deposited at the time the Lake Erie basin was formed. This was long before the period of which we are now speaking. At this time the clay had already been deposited, the glacier had passed on and left the basin which was now tilted with water to the brim, from the summit on the south lo the Cana- dian highlands on the north, and extending east and west from the Adirondacks to Lake Superior. We spoke of the mountainous region of the north from whence the glaciers which produced the icebergs came. Nothing now remains but the bases of these mountains to tell of their long ago existence, as they were eroded and worn away by these immense fields of ice.
Glaciers are being formed at the present time in the mountainons region of the interior of Greenland, and as they push their way to the ocean, the foot is shoved out into the sea, is broken npand rises to the surface. They are no longer glaciers, but icebergs. Floating away to the southward, they are often stranded on the banks or sand-bars of Newfoundland, and there perform the same work that these did here in the drift age, depositing large quantities of their debris over the floor of the ocean. In ages to come, when the bottom of the ocean shall have again been raised above the water, the same conditions will be found to exist there that we now find here.
The northern border of this great inland sea was along the base of the highlands in Canada, called by geologists Laurentian highlands. They are about three hundred miles north of Lake Erie. As these icebergs pushed ont into the water from this northern shore, they were driven hither and thither by every stormy change of wind. They deposited their debris wherever aud as fast as they melted. Sometimes being driven into shallow water, they stranded. llere they slowly melted away until they were light enough to clear themselves and float again. At such points they dropped larger quantities of boulders than elsewhere.
22
HISTORY OF LORAIN COUNTY, OHIO.
These places may readily be picked out all over the country, and many of our farms are made less valuable by the numerous boulders on some of their fields.
That these boulders were dropped from floating ice- bergs, is very clearly proven by their position as we now find them in our fields. Almost every farmer knows that these big boulders, or " hard-heads," are very ditlieult to get out of the ground, for the simple reason that the Firgest end is always in the ground. This of itself is almost conclusive evidence, aside from any other, that they must have fallen some distance through water, and in falling the larger end would naturally go down. We can account for this phe- nomenon by no other theory. We find no boulders in or upon the sand ridges, for the reason that the ridges were deposited al a later period, and consequently whatever boulders may have been on the surface are now buried beneath the sand.
"The reader will observe that we have spoken of three different and distinct drift deposits, which occurred at different periods in the earth's history. We will therefore place them in the order in which they occur:
Ist. Glacial drift-clay, sand, gravel, etc.
2d. Iceberg drift-boulders, sand and other debris.
Bd. Water drift-flood-wood and sand ridges.
The great difficulty in studying the drift has been in not keeping the different periods and causes sepa- rate: this will enable us to do so. I am aware, however, that good anthority differs with me on some of these points: but after great care and research, I think the evidence will bear me out in my drift theory.
It may be asked, how do we know that these boulders came from this northern region beyond the lake? In the first place, we have no evidence of glaciers push- ing themselves into this great body of water from any other direction than on the north; and then, too, we find that these boulders exactly correspond with the rocks found in place along this northern belt, so that aow we may readily trace some of the erratic rocks found here back to their original beds of deposition. I have lying before me a piece of granite, that is tilled with graphite (black load we call it, though there is no lead about it). This fragment I broke from a bondder on my father's farm, in Ridgeville, nearly forty years ago. We can now trace this graphite directly back to its home on the Georgian Bay, in Canada. Copper is not unfrequently found in the boulders of our county, plainly showing their Lake Superior origin.
Thus, by the composition of these boulders, and the minerals they carry with them, we are able to tell where they came from: and by the position in which we find them, and the grooves and markings on the surface rocks, we are enabled to tell how they came here.
ANCIENT FOREST BEDS,
Beneath the sand ridges there are more or less of the remains of forest trees, called " flood-wood." It was drifted into its present resting place when the lake
was from one to two hundred feet higher than it now is, and covered beneath the sand when the ridges were formed. Abont forty years ago my father, in digging a well (on the ridge), one mile east of the center of Ridgeville, came upon trees about one foot in diameter, at a depth of fifteen feet below the surface. This wood, although changed, was not fossilized, but was soft and yielding, and could easily be cut with a sharp spade. 1 very well remember the men examining it very closely by whittling, tasting, smell- ing. etc., and after much deliberation pronounced it cedar wood. Their decision was probably correct, as all the timber, so far as I know, found beneath the ridges, is coniferous (cone-bearing trees). We have the record, however, in some localities, of hickory, sycamore, willow and some other kinds of wood being found beneath the drift. An old forest bed was very widely distributed over the northern half of our conti- nent. Togive some idea of its magnitude and extent, I quote from different authorities the following:
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