USA > Ohio > Muskingum County > History of Muskingum County, Ohio ; with illustrations and biographical sketches of prominent men and pioneers, 1794 > Part 61
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None of these igneous rocks are found in any place within the State of Ohio, though they ex- ist in vast quantities in the mining districts of the West, and on the shores of Lake Superior. From the latter region, numerous fragments were brought to us during the Glacial period, and they constitute a prominent feature in the drift deposits that cover so large a part of our State.
DRIFT .- After the valleys eroded as they now exist, many of them were filled with what is termed "drift" materials, which are chiefly water worn pebbles and bowlders, sand, and sometimes clays. The principal outspread of the drift, is in the northwestern part of the dis- trict in the Scioto Valley, and near the sources of the Hocking and Licking rivers. In this region, the surface of the earth is almost wholly covered with superficial deposits. brought from the north. Some of the materials are not found within the State, but come from beyond the lakes. Limestone bowlders and gravel show, from their
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20. Coal and slate. 0
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28. Shale.
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HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.
contained fossils and lithographic character, that they originally came from the corniferous lime- stone, a formation well developed in the northern part of the State. All the streams which have their sources within the great drift region of the central and northern part of the State, have carried down more or less of the drift materials, and deposited them in sand bars and sandy flats. These now constitute the well known terraces of the Scioto, Hocking and Muskingum rivers. The Ohio river is also bordered by these terraces, the materials having been largely brought to it, by its northern affluents. The tributaries to the Ohio from the South, as the Little and Great Ken- awhas, have no such terraces. The same is true of all the smaller Ohio tributaries, such as Rac- coon, Little Muskingum and Duck Creek, which do not have their heads in the central drift region.
In the terraced drift we find two classes of materials, the hard and the comparatively soft. The former is composed of diorytes and grani- toid forms, quartzites and other metamorphic rocks, and the cherty portions of limestones. The latter is made up of softer sandstones, slates and bituminous coals. I have found small bowl- ders of fine grained Waverly sandstones, which, for fineness of texture, and softness under the chisel, and perfection of color, I have never seen surpassed. Their original home was in the Waverly formation, and not very far to the north. for such is the softness of the material, that they could not long have survived the friction of roll- ing in currents of water, surrounded by harder bowlders, much less the more wasting friction of propulsion by glaciers, under enormous ice pres- sure. We sometimes find similar soft material only very slightly eroded.
In the large terrace formed at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, on which the town of Marietta is built, we often find large quantities of pebbles of bituminous coal. Bushels could sometimes be taken from a single spot, of all sizes, from four inches in diameter downward. Bituminous coal being soft and easily eroded, the coal of these pebbles must have been torn from its native seam at some point in our Ohio coal measures, but a short distance up the Mus- kingum, probably not above Zanesville. It has been estimated that the lumps of coal of medium size, dropped into the Ohio river from steam- boats and barges, are worn away to nothing in rolling on the bottom, a distance of from fifty to one hundred miles. Pebbles and bowlders of Ohio coal measure sandstone are also often found in the drift terraces on the Muskingun. It will be remembered that this river holds its course chiefly within the limits of the coal for- mation.
The highest elevation on which I have found drift bowlders is on the summit of Flint Ridge, Licking county, which is 170 feet above the ad- jacent valley. To this add fifty feet as the esti- mated elevation of the base of the ridge above Newark, and we have bowlders 220 feet above Newark, and 374 above Zanesville, and 490 above Marietta, and 729 above Cincinnati.
The terraces in the olden time presented great attractions to the Mound Builder race. We everywhere find on them earth works, in the form of mounds, elevated squares, walls and ditches. Being dry and sandy, the surface could be easily removed and accumulated in their various structures. To the profound questions of the ethnologist, who the mound builders were. whence they came, and whither they went. we can .only reply that they once lived here, here cultivated the soil, here worshiped, perhaps with the solemn rites of human sacrifice, here planned and executed mighty works of organized labor, and then passed away. We find their temples, and fortresses, and tombs.
COAL FORMATION .- It is probable that there was a long period of repose and freedom from those dynamic agencies of subsistence which de press the crust of the earth, and after the depo sition of the vast sandy flats now constituting the Waverly strata. During this period. there was doubtless more or less erosion of the sur face, and it was brought into comparatively un- even condition. Whether the thin beds of the Maxville limestone were deposited before this erosion took place, and so shared in it as now to be left in isolated patches, or were deposited at first in limited basins, is as yet undetermined.
Passing upward in the series, we reach the Productive Coal measures. In places, however, we find an intervening conglomerate.
The transition from the Waverly to the coal- measures, shows an entire change in the litholog- ical character of the strata, and in the methods of distribution of the sedimentary materials. The Waverly materials were evidently derived from some shore where there was great lithological sameness, and they were spread with wonderful evenness upon the ocean floor. This floor was level to begin with, for it was formed by the even- ly accumulated mass of semi-organic matter, which now constitutes the great Ohio black slate. or Huron shales. The materials of sand and clays would not, of necessity, be evenly spread, be- cause their accumulation so perfectly balanced the general subsidence as to keep the incoming materials always in shallow water, and hence, just where the leveling power of the waves would be the greatest.
The conglomerate is, in Jackson county, a very remarkable deposit of sand and pebbles. In some places, it is over one hundred and thirty feet thick. resting upon the Waverly, and, in a short dis- tance, it is completely thinned out to nothing. The pebbles are often a mass of white quartz. or perfectly pure quartzite. sometimes with a diam- eter of several inches. They tell a tale of rough water and powerful currents. But such deposits are local, and I find no proof whatever that a conglomerate stratum constitutes the regular and continuous floor on which the productive coal- measures of the second district were laid. 1 find in Ohio, many conglomerates in the coal-meas- ures at different horizons, none, indeed, so coarse as the one sometimes found resting on the Wa- verly, but they all have a limited horizontal range.
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HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.
They thin out and pass into finer sandstones, and often into shales formed of fine sedimentary mud. In the coal-measures of the second dis- trict, no sand rock, so far as I know, extends through the whole line of the out-crop of the for- mation. Both, conglomerates and finer grained sandstones, are very uncertain in their horizontal ranges. The same is true of the shales and clays. We have almost all possible forms of sedimen- tary materials, and in almost all possible condi- tions of deposition. Hence, frequent changes are to be met with along the same geological hori- zon. The only strata showing continuity over great horizontal spaces, are the coal seams, with their under-clays, and certain fossiliferous lime- stones. The unfossiliferous lime-stones of the productive coal-measures, which were deposited as a calcareous mud, are of very limited horizon- tal extent. The unusually thick group of lime- stones over the Wheeling coal, at Wheeling, West Virginia, and at Bellaire, in Belmont county, Ohio, are scarcely found further west in Muskin- gum county, and to the southwest, in Meigs coun- ty, they have no representative, whatever. We may find lime-stones of this class, from ten to thirty feet thick, in one place, and a few miles away, in the same horizon, there is not a trace of them to be found. They were formed of calca- reous mud, and follow, in their distribution, the same laws of distribution of the other mud rocks of the coal-measures. None of them were of deep water origin, for they not only sometimes exhibit surface dried cracks, but they are found between, and in proximity to, seams of coal which were sub-aerial in their origin. All the various strata which constitute the filling in of the spaces be- tween seams of coal, whether formed from grav- els, sands, clays, or limestones, excepting three or four fossiliferous limestones, are subject to all those changes which would be expected in off- shore deposits, where the not very far distant land afforded many kinds of materials, and where the waters, not very deep, were quiet in some places, and rough in others, and thus produced every possible variety of deposition.
The few fossiliferous lime-stones of the coal- measures, of which the Putnam Hill, Ferriferous, Cambridge and Ames lime-stones are the most im- portant and interesting, were all formed, I think, in quite shallow, and, at the same time, quiet wat- ers, from the accumulation of lime-secreting ani- mals. In each case there was, probably, an ar- rest of the progress of subsidence, long enough for the accumulation of calcareous organic matter to form the stratum of lime-stones, very much as in the formation of a seam of coal, there was an arrest of subsidence, and a pause long enough for the growth and accumulation of the vegetable matter constituting the coal. Some of these lime- stones were formed upon a sea-bed almost per- fectly level and uniform, and show remarkable parallelism with each. other, and with seams of coal. It is, however, the coal itself which pre- sents the most interesting object of investigation in the second district, and it is to this subject I have devoted the most attention. I shall present .
some of the results of my own independent obser- vations, relative to the origin, varieties and uses of coals, believing, however, that the views are in essential harmony with the accepted opinions of our better geologists.
Notwithstanding the elaborate attempt of Bisch- off, and others, to prove that coal is an accumu- lation of vegetable detritus, drifted by rivers and buried beneath accumulating sediment in the ocean, this view is not now accepted by any who have carefully studied the coal-seams in the coal- measures in America. Mr. Leo Lesquereux and Dr. Dawson have shown, as the result of careful and extended observations, that the vegetation forming seams of coal grew where it is now buried, the only movement being downward in the general subsi- dence. Atter such subsidence, sedimentary ma- terials were brought over the vegetable mass, fill- ing up the water, so as to form, in time, a new sub-aerial surface, on which new vegetation took root and grew, to form, in time, when buried, an- other seam of coal. My own independent obser- vations, continued through many years, convince me that in no other way are the seams of coal, in our coal-measures, formed. There is, moreover, every evidence that the vegetation grew upon marshy plains, more or less extensive, skirting the ocean, or, perhaps, often constituting low islands, not far from the ancient shore. This ap- pears from the fact that slates and shales accom- panying the coal, and in immediate proximity to it, often contain marine or brackish-water forms of later palæozoic life. These slates sometimes constitute partings in the coal-seam itself, and ex- tend for miles, maintaining with wonderful exact- ness their stratigraphical position. These part- ings imply a temporary overflow of the ancient marsh, by the ocean, and an even distribution of sediment, which, when compressed, constitutes the thin layer of slate, or clay. Besides, we find in the very coal itself, and especially in the can- nel portions of seams-for cannel coal is, so far as my observations go, only a local modification of a regular bituminous coal-seam-marine forms of ancient life, of which lingulæ and fishes are, perhaps, most common. We also find, in some seams of coal, the evidence of tidal or other over- flow of the coal marsh, in beach-worn sticks, and various forms of wood, which now, changed to bi-sulphide of iron, are preserved in their original form, and lie in the coal as they were drifted into the old marsh. After the complete subsidence of the whole marsh, we often find the proofs that trees, as sigillaria lepidodendron, and taller ferns were broken down where they grew by the in- coming waters, and buried on the spot by the sed- iments. I once traced the trunk of a sigillaria in the roof of a Pomeroy seam of coal, for a distance of more than forty feet. Thousands of the trunks of what Mr. Lesquereux takes to be pecopteris arborescens are found in the slates over the same coal, lying in a horizontal burial, as they were bent or broken down by the waters, which also brought in their stormy winding sheet. In mak- ing almost thousands of geological sections in our coal-measures, I have found seams of coal always
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ALLEN
CRATINGS
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FOUNDRY
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HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.
maintaining such relations to what were the an- cient water levels, that I am fully convinced that, in every case, the vegetation grew along the water line, and not far above it.
I have never found the slightest proof of the formation of a seam of coal over hills or high grounds. The parallelism of the seams, of which further mention will be made, forbids it. Doubt- less, vegetation of certain kinds grew upon the higher grounds, but this vegetation did not con- stitute seams of coal. It is plain, that whatever vegetable matter there might be on a hill-side, would, in the subsidence of the land, present to the waves of an encroaching sea an easy prey, and the trees and humbler plants would be torn from the exposed moorings, and be drifted away to rot upon the waters, or be buried in the sands of the beach.
Such drifted and buried trees are frequently found. Should there have been some high level plateau, upon which the vegetation grew, and which, in the subsidence, was let down below the water so evenly as to prevent the waters from tearing the vegetable materials away, it is still doubtful whether, on such high and dry areas, there would have been any considerable accu- mulation of vegetable matter, the decay so equal- ing the growth that, in reality, there would have been no materials for a true seam of coal.
While in the vegetation forming the coal seams upon marshy savannahs skirting the ocean, we find constant proof that the continuity of the marsh was often broken by intervening water, so that the seam of coal is frequently interrupted. In the subsequent subsidence, these water spaces were filled up with sands, or clays, which are now hardened and compressed into shales and sand- stones. But, if we have a marsh at one point,
which continued long enough to allow of the ac- cumulation of vegetable matter sufficient for a considerable seam of coal, the presumption is, that, on that exact horizon, we shall find that there were other areas above the water, on which vegetation also grew, and thus, along one water line, there be formed a seam of coal, varying in its features of thickness and quality, ranging, with many interruptions, through many counties, and, perhaps, hundreds of miles. A long period of rest from downward movement, such as the growth and accumulation of a thick seam of coal imply, almost necessitates the fact that, during that long period, wherever there were along the water line, areas of low land, whether insular or continental fringes, on which vegetation might take root and grow, there would be such growth, and, consequently, a seam of coal.
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When the subsidence took place, by which the marsh, or marshes, of one horizontal line were lowered beneath the water, the presumption is, that such subsidence would be an even and regu- lar one. We can hardly suppose that, within any limited area, there would be any considerable ir- regularity in the sinking-any irregular plunges downward, here and there, so as to tilt at various angles the plane of the coal. The subsidence was, of course, greater in some districts than in others.
In Nova Scotia, there are 14,570 feet of produc- tive coal-measures, with over eighty distinct seams of coal. In Eastern Pennsylvania, 3.000 feet are reported ; while in Southern Ohio, the highest coal seam yet found is about 1.500 feet above the Waverly sandstone, upon which, at places, a coal seam, with its under-clay, is found to rest, with no intervening conglomerate. It is, also, entirely possible that, when any large areas of any one coal field are carefully investigated, it will be found that some portion of such large area may have had a somewhat more rapid subsidence than the rest. But, as a rule, the subsidence was so regular that two seams of coal, each formed in its water line, are found to present an almost per- fect parallelism. For example, in Ohio, the Nel- sonville seam of coal is found, in the vertical se- ries, to be about four hundred and twenty feet below the Pomeroy seam, the equivalent of the Wheeling and Pittsburgh seam. These two seams range through many counties, and everywhere the interval between them is the same. The same is true of all our other well defined and continu- ous seams. One careful measurement of the in- terval between two seams is so excellent a guide that, either seam being found, the place of the other can readily be determined. There may be difficulty in ascertaining the exact interval, be- cause there may be considerable horizontal dis- tance between the exposures of the seams, and calculations must generally be made for the dip. usually an unknown term ; but when the meas- urements are accurate, the parallelism is perfect and beautiful. There is a little play of variation. sometimes, but it is generally very slight. In lim- ited areas, the downward movement could hardly be otherwise than uniform. Even in cases of earthquake action, we generally find the areas of elevation or subsidence to be quite extensive. But there is no proof that, in the Coal Period, there was any intense earthquake action, nor any con- vulsive disturbances, which would give to the plane of a coal seam great irregularities in incli- nation. It must be remembered that the eleva- tion of the Alleghanies, and the foldings of the Appalachian region, and all the thousand undu- lations given to the strata of our coal fields were subsequent to the formation of our coal-measures. The results of the most careful observations in all our coal fields, create a reasonable belief that the subsidence was semi-continental in character, and that the crust of the earth settled down in an even and dignified way.
So far as my observations go. I have never found an instance where two distinct seams of coal came together, or conversely, where a seam became divided and its parts continued to diverge for a long or indefinite distance. It is not un- common to find, in a seam of coal, the proof that the coal marsh had in it local depressions. which were filled with sediment, making a soil on which new vegetation grew, and thus the seam shows two parts, separated by fire clay. sometimes several feet thick, but in every in- stance, when traced, I have found the parts to reunite. The two parts never diverge indefinitely.
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HISTORY OF MUSKINGUM COUNTY, OHIO.
From these statements, we may infer a general law of parallelism. Such law is in harmony with the belief of the most careful observers, that our productive coal period was characterized by great quietness and freedom from violent local disturbances.
"The only question open to discussion, (says Prof. Rogers.) is whether in an instance like that of the huge mass of the Summit Hill mines, and Panther Creek Tunnels, (in Pa., ) where the bed possesses very unusual thickness, the ex- pansion of its size is caused by the merging into the principal bed of other adjoining coal seams through the thinning away of the dividing strata, or is merely a local enlargement of the one coal bed between the same roof and floor, arising from more active deposition at this spot of the vegetable materials which formed it. If we were in possession of any complete sections of the lower coal measures, such as those of Nesquehoning and Tamaqua coals, illustrative of the condition of things nearer to the Summit mine than those local- ities, we might, from such data, possibly deter- mine the running together or not of some of those beds to form this great deposit, but no intermedi- ate points have been developed, and the distance of the two localities named, one four and a half miles and the other five miles, is too considerable to permit us to institute any close comparison be- tween the individual beds at either of them and that of the Summit. To explain the unusual thickness of the great bed by the coalescing of several large seams of the Nesquehoning group, we must assume, if we take the "main lower coal" and the two next which overlie it, as those which have here come together, that there has occurred a total exhaustion of about 134 feet of included rock, or if we suppose only this "main lower coal" and the double or Rowland's coal to have united, we have still to conceive of the thinning out of seventy-seven feet of sandstone in a range of only four and a half miles. A like diffi- culty besets us when we consider the thick plates of sandstones and slate which we must assume as having disappeared between the Little Schuylkill and the Summit, if we would derive the great bed from the coming together of any two or more of the principal lower seams of that locality. Never- theless, so much more uniform are the coal beds generally, than the mechanically derived sand- stones-so much more easy is it when we advert to the respective circumstances, under which these two classes of deposition originated, to as- cribe a rapid variation of thickness to the widely- strewn strata of sand and pebbles, than to the slowly and gently accumulated layers of vegeta- tion of the ancient carboniferous marshes -- that I strongly incline to that view which assumes the apparent alteration of thickness to be due to the thinning out of the arenaceous rocks."
From this language, it appears that no facts have been obtained by careful stratigraphical measurements to prove the actual coming to- gether of the different seams of coal, but the union is assumed as, on the whole, the least diffi- cult way of explaining the usual thickening of
the coal at the Summit. This, of course, is only the opinion of Prof. Rogers, and is entitled to all the weight which the opinion of so eminent a geologist should receive. It is readily granted that sands are accumulated along shore lines with great unevenness. This depends upon the strength of currents and the quantity of material. Along a shore there are many places of compar- atively quiet water, where finer sediments, now compressed into shales, are deposited, and we often find these shales alternating with sand- stones. In Ohio, on the same horizon, I find sometimes sixty feet of sandrock, and a few miles away sixty feet of shales. The marginal area below the water must be filled up with some- thing, and the unevenness of the resulting bed- ding of the sandrock, or shales, is not a matter of consequence, nor is it pertinent to the solution of the problem in hand, viz: The explanation of the universal thickening of a coal seam at a given point. The real difficulty is antecedent to the filling in of a submerged area by mechanical sediments, it matters not whether by "sand and pebbles widely strewn." or by mud gently dropped in more quiet water. How came a part of a marsh, with its coal-making vegetation, 134 feet below its original level. while the remaining part of the marsh maintained such a wonderful statical equilibrium just at the water line? I do not say that this is impossible, but it is not prob- able, indeed it is so improbable, that it may not be lightly inferred.
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