History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 7

Author:
Publication date: 1910
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1162

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This Little Killbuck was in preglacial times the Big Killbuck-in fact, the only Killbuck, for the drainage south from Overton was only a rivulet. The Little Killbuck is now an anomaly, reversing the common law of creeks ; it is a creek turned upside down. Its gravel bottom is now on top, supported by a shelf of boulder clay and sand, and the water runs beneath except in springtime freshets when its torrential waters carry great loads of gravel and clay to its mouth and there bank it. In this way it has driven the channel of Killbuck across the plain half a mile, where it is now eating out a bed from the Waverly shale and sandstone on the Eicher farm, section 5. Two miles to the south the new Apple creek has sent the Killbuck across the valley to the western hills in the same manner, as I have found evidence of three distinct channels of the Killbuck-each one long used-between the Cemetery hill and its present bed, which hugs the shale and glacial hills on the west three-quarters of a mile away, and between these old channels and the Apple creek the bea- vers had their home-life fun in the quiet waters, held by the dams they built from cedar logs which are now found in the buried channels.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

The drainage of the northeast section-that bounded by the Continental and the north and south divide-included the bulk of Wayne and Canaan townships. The three heads of the present and old Killbuck followed the line of least resistance with the strike of the strata to near Jackson where they united and carried their waters to the Old Mohican, near Sterling. But in glacial times this channel was blocked by drift above Jackson and the waters turned west to cut a new channel through the shale of the north and south divide to Burbank, nearly seven miles away, where the stream was again turned at an obtuse angle into the old Killbuck channel, passing, after travel- ing twenty-four miles, within one mile of the springs that form its head.

The drainage from the southwest of the divide from Overton to Wooster is represented by the Clear creek and the Christmas run. The Clear creek follows the strike of the strata in an old preglacial scoring to section 31 in Wayne township, where the old channel to the fair ground by the shale works was blocked by hundreds of feet of drift, creating beautiful terraces over the John McSweeny and Yoder farms on section 5, Wooster township, and there had to cut its way through the shales of the Eicher farm, section 6, to the channel of the little Killbuck.

The Christmas run practically follows a preglacial over a boulder and boulder clay bed, but now cuts into the shale on the Byres farm, southeast quarter section 5, making a bed of the rock and giving the student a wealth of Devonian fossils-stone lilies, productus shells and conularia for his cabinet.

The drainage from Wooster University to the divide east of the summit near Smithville, where the dip of the strata of stone determines the end of the Cincinnati Arch, or Silurian island, the primitive rocks ran under, or were torn out by the floods of the Old Mohican, and all drainage from the island was sucked into it. The Quimby's run and the Wayne county head of what is now known as the Little Sugar creek were directed to the axial channel around the head of the island, and their channels tell the story by their deep dippings into the silurian rocks.

The rivulets and creeks that formed the heads of all preglacial streams started from the rock with the dip of the rock and only marred the strike of the strata by erosion as they proceeded. The valleys in which the larger streams now run average-from rock summit to rock summit-about three- fourths of a mile, but the rock floor averages about one hundred and fifty to two hundred feet below the flood plain of the streams, the old channel being filled to that depth with drift over which the present streams meander from side to side like the wanderings of the old time snake, or even the present black ones near Overton.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

This gives you a descriptive picture of the northeast face of this primi- tive island, the first dry land in the United States; but can you reproduce it in your minds? Can you contemplate it? The elements had been warring on its sides and summits for thousands of years. Its pinnacles were eaten by the winds as by acids. Its rocks were disintegrating. Its sides were scarred with deep gullies, like miniature canyons, by erosion as the floods carried the degraded rocks to the sea. The island was an empire of silence save for the wild waves dashing against its scabrous sides, but there was no sense to feel and no ear to hear save God's. Desolation marked each nook and cranny. There was no motion or sound of any living thing, for the atmosphere was but a paste of carbon which no living beast nor creeping thing could breathe. And yet! here is the foundation upon which God built up the northwest half of Wayne county.

"The ways of the Maker are dark ; Who knows how God will bring them about?"

Professor Newbury again says, "A current from the south swept the east- ern shore of our 'Ancient Atlantis,' that floated the trunks of tree ferns and branches of lepidodendron to Sandusky." The waters were warm in this Silurian sea and receiving the wild water from the island, with its load of de- grant rock, coupled with the difference of temperature, specific gravity and chemic composition refused to mingle and a current round the shore resulted, and this current gave the initial direction to the preglacial stream which we now denominate the Old Mohican, and which in after time carried not only the waters of the Waverly capped island, but of the virgin coal fields as well exactly between them to the great channel in the bed of Lake Erie.

As previously stated, a fringe of the drainage from the crest of the continental divide south of West Salem was carried into the Muddy fork of the Mohican. Now this stream follows a preglacial channel that drained the southeast face of the incline from Perrysburgh to Polk and Rowsburgh in Ashland county and passing between Rowsburgh in Ashland and Little Pitts- burgh in Wayne county, it proceeded to the southwest corner of Chester town- ship, where it entered Wayne county, and became a part and parcel of it. It then continued in a slightly irregular course southeast to near Blachleysville, on the bank of the Indian "Big Meadow" and the white man's "Big Prairie" in Plain township. Here it may have joined the large preglacial channel from Ashland, passing by Jeromesville to the village of Big Prairie, or Custaloga, on the Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad, where it entered the axial channel from Londonville, now known as the Old Mohican.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

But there is another possible, if not probable, way which I will try to explain. The entire south front or mouth of the Big Prairie was blocked by glacial drift piled into hills hundreds of feet high which turned the waters of both the Jerome and Muddy forks of the Mohican back upon themselves, cre- ating a lake three hundred feet deep and one to three miles wide from Shreve and Big Prairie to near Jeromesville.

Now through this lake-creating barrier a deep and wide preglacial chan- nel has been discovered at the "Heller's Tavern" cross roads, about one mile east of the Camp Station on the Ashland & Wooster railroad and this channel continues to the old town of Millbrook and on across the D. Myres farm (section 6, Franklin township) and connects with the Old Mohican near Millbrook Station on the Pittsburg, Ft. Wayne & Chicago railroad.

This valley would have been followed by the Ashland & Wooster rail- road to the Camp clay plant from Millbrook village instead of from Custaloga, had not the engineer informed the projectors that their track could not be maintained, for the waters of the Big Prairie would rush-in spring floods- into the half-mile cut they would have to make through the glacial barrier, thus creating a col through which the waters would not only flood the railroad, but probably turn the Muddy fork of the Mohican into the Killbuck by Mill- brook village, as the flood plain of the Big Prairie is over one hundred feet higher than the plain of the Killbuck.

The north end of this buried channel so nearly meets a projection of the Muddy fork near Blachleysville across sections 29 and 31 of Plain township that I think it probable the pre-glacial Muddy fork had its continuance to the axial channel-the Old Mohican-by this route, leaving the Jerome fork pass singly to some point between Shreve and Custaloga.

This completes my simple sketch of the northwest half of Wayne coun- ty's native rock formation and drainage lines and includes the townships of Congress, Chester, Plain, Clinton, Wooster, Wayne and Canaan; also parts of East Union, Greene and Milton.

There was a long time of waiting for the other half of Wayne county to be created. The years are marked by the million, for the Alleghany moun- tains were yet under the sea, their picturesque peaks were only a dream in the plan of evolution, and even when they were up in the mist of the dense atmosphere, there was a still longer wait before the broad arm of the ocean fretting between our primitive island and the west Alleghanies gave way to the carboniferous flora that preceded the formation and building up of the Alleghany coal fields, with the seven veins of coal and the intervening strata of shale, sand and conglomerate that now form the hills and vales of north-

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

eastern Wayne county, and include the townships of Paint, Sugar Creek, Baughman, Chippewa, Salt Creek and Franklin, with parts of East Union, Greene and Milton. Each of these is underlaid with coal, with occasional dove-tailings into the eroded channels of the Waverly.

Now that the rock foundation of half our county is completed, might it not be well to contemplate the structure and its surroundings while waiting the evolution of the other half and note the methods of the Maker and Keeper and Controller of the universe in His creation of a continent ?

Let us place on a pinnacle of the rock which is now graced by Wooster University, a primitive man-a multi-millionaire (in years, not gold)-and push his "nature's place" back in time a million years, but give him the sense of a troglodyte, for he must have a sentience sufficient to feel the moving of the spirit of God upon the waters around him and a perception of the spirit of development under his feet in the island, the first dry land in the United States, and which was then as a "babe in the womb," but possessed of an in- distinct uneasiness, waiting, but pulsing for the light that it might have life in the open. Time was not, for the sun was hid by the vapors surrounding the earth. The air was loaded with the heated earth's distillate and in the earth was only a thrill like a shudder of "life in death" to give promise of a land plant that could live in this noxious air.

So only expectancy was beneath our millionaire's feet and all that was before or behind him was the ocean,

"That glorious mirror where the Almighty's form Glasses itself in tempests. That image of Eternity, from out whose slime The monsters of the deep are made."

This awfulness was his environment; while the desolate, naked crags of Waverly sandstone, only relieved by the shrubless, lifeless, but soft expectant shale, was beneath him in the island, which, like a chrysalis in its cocoon, was waiting for its carbon case to break, that light might come in, and with light life to the land plant.

I say expectant shale, because in the shales we find more of the active principles of life than in all other strata. Whatever clumsy name you give to the initial that the world's Ordainer and the world's Sustainer placed in the earth to fructify it-"vis vita," "primordial germ," or "vital unit." I refer you to Genesis, which says, "Whose seed is in itself upon the earth," and geo- biology says the shales are largely its keeper.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

And these same shales dipped under the ocean, forming its bed and fur- nished the first seaweed for the first animal life, while the laws governing this evolution gave the formula, or working agency, by which Omnipotence cre- ates continents and develops life on their surfaces. Distinctly had these laws been operating in the evolution of life in the waters, for the ocean was teem- ing with fishes which were early brought forth, receiving their food and oxy- gen from the water they could live in, when land plants could not.

But suddenly this monotony is broken and gives place to one of nature's creative convulsions. Our man on his pinnacle senses deep rumblings and dread tremblings. He is enveloped in lightnings and waves are dashed over him. The sea is rising and the island is tilting. It seems like the end of all things, but is only a second beginning, for when the catastrophe is over the ocean bed has taken the place of the sea. Virgin land is up for its first bap- tism in air. Nature's gestation is over and world has a new and added land with new aspirations and new potentialities. Evolution has a new field where we can study creative problems and note the factors and formula of develop- ment.

The surface of the new land is one of ooze and slime, entombing the mutilated bodies of fishes, and the salt of the sea is gathered into pools. But an age passes while the fresh waters from our island on the west and the Alleghanies is flooding the ooze and dissolving the salt and a dim light has entered through the vapors above, and our man on the mountain sees lichens clinging to the rocks, ferns and club mosses, and rushes growing between, while the lowest forms of animal life are feeding on the fronds in what is known as a coal marsh.

The coal plant must live and die in a swamp, for it must be covered with water or mud when it falls, or it will not be transformed into coal. Our multi-millionaire must wait thousands of years for this first cryptogamous forest to flourish and fade.

But the time comes at last, and, with another convulsion, the land with all its flora sinks from sight and the ocean is here again to receive the degra- dation of the hills on the east and on the west and spread them over this sunken virgin forest, that distillation may go on to purification and the forest be presented to the twentieth century as perfect coal, and denominated coal seam No. I.

Another period passes with the sea dominant; but the flight of time is marked by change, and the bed of the sea is again inspired to rise, and on its breast and in its ooze to grow a new and completer coal forest, with higher orders of plant and animal life. So in the coals we find the fossil plants :

Totems, or Tribal Symbols. About three-fifths natural size.

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

the lepidodendron (the scaly tree), sometimes one hundred feet high and twelve feet in circumference; the beautiful sigillaria ( the seal tree), the giant calamite, with hosts of lower forms of flowerless plants and these in such profusion that a coal forest represented a tropical jungle, in which insect life played a mysterious but conspicuous part.

These coal plants were the especial feature of the carboniferous age of the Mesozoic time ; in fact, a necessity in its evolution and preparation for the future.

Plants are the only things that know how to manufacture living material out of inorganic mud; but plants do not take all their food from the earth, for they take up carbonic acid from the air through their leaves and decom- pose it, retain the carbon, and give off the oxygen.

Animal life takes up oxygen and gives off carbonic acid. Now during the carboniferous age the atmosphere was so charged with acid carbon that no animal could live in it if permanently out of the water, so these forests were inspired as a media to extract and lay up the carbon, and so utilize the destructive element to animal life, and lay it down in coal for the future use of man, for whose advent on earth the initial steps were being prepared.

Five times more this down of the ocean and up of the land was repeated. The new land with all its flora and fauna went down seven times, putting the forests to sleep in coal at each separate submergence and flattening the bones of primitive life to fossil, thus forming the seven veins of coal found in our Eastern hills.

Each time that the earth went down and the sea became master it brought immense loads of degraded rock that the wild waves had torn from the con- tinent and dashed into sand and mud and spread them over its bottom; and these, with the ground-up corals and shells and pebbles rolled into marble forms, produced a new stratum between the coal seams and heightened the hills of our growing country.

As said above, seven times was it necessary for a forest to grow and appropriate the carbon in the air and lay it down in coal, to prepare a way for air-breathing animals to have a permanent home on its surface. In the last period of the coal formations the animal kingdom had greatly advanced. When the first coals were put down the forms of life were all of the water genera, but in the last we had a rich and varied terrestrial vegetation and many air-breathing animals, but there was a long lapse of time before the earth was fitted for the higher orders-the prelude to man. With the close of the carboniferous age, although our hills were completed and partially fitted for

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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

terrestrial vegetation, yet the upper factors of the Mesozoic aeon-the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous ages-the ages of reptiles and birds, together with the Tertiary age, the age of mammals, was never represented in Ohio as in other parts of the world, for Ohio was out of the water and has so remained during all these ages. During all this vast period Wayne county was basking in a gradually developing sunshine, and growing immense forests and putting the leaves and dead branches down in humus, that grasses might grow and flowering plants spring up and bloom, birds multiply and render the for- ests vocal, preparing the way for man's advent in the county, which was par- tially achieved when the hills were completed in the new half of Wayne county. This new half is made up of other stuff than the first and older half, for the University hill is a million, if not millions of years older than the Ex- periment Station hill ; the former's rocks represent the Silurian and Devonian aeons of the world's organic history and present the earliest forms of perfect life in their fossils, while the latter shows all the varied forms of flowerless plants, from ferns to sigillaria, but no bird enlivened the scene. The hills of the new half are made up of coal and conglomerate, capped with sand- stone and limestone, chert and iron ore, through Wayne and Holmes coun- ties, making, with the Waverly of the island, a bowl or hydrographic basin, shaped almost like a huge mussel shell. Its southwest end is found between Independence and Bellville in Richland county, and its axis is almost parallel with that of Lake Erie, and this axis followed the primordial current around the head of our Silurian island that carried the fresh water that flowed into the salt sea from the island, creating the "Newberry current" around the head of the "Incline" to the great northeast channel through the initial Lake Erie, and now, after the development of the coal measure hills, drains both he island and the virgin coal hills into a slightly curved channel passing dis- tinctly from Loudonville to Sterling, and thence by Rocky river to Lake Erie, and now known as the Old Mohican, for in the ancient time all the branches of the Big Mohican drained northeast through this deep and wide waterway. running exactly between the base of the Silurian island and the carboniferous conglomerate.

The rock floor of this river-that no man ever saw-is at Loudonville, two hundred and sixty-two feet above Lake Erie; at the railroad bridge over the Lake fork, two hundred and forty-five: at Odel's lake, two hundred and twenty-eight ; at Big Prairie, two hundred and fourteen: at Custaloga, two hundred and ten ; Shreve, two hundred; near Millbrook Station, one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five, and one and a half miles south of Wooster, one hundred and forty-seven feet. At the Mock farm, section 6, East Union town-

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

ship, no rock was struck at one thousand eight hundred and eighty-five feet. Wellhead, three hundred and forty-five, which proves less than one hundred and sixty ; but here we encounter mountains of drift, and no wells have been drilled into them, so the channel is obscured, but near Orrville it enters the great Orrville swamp, or lake, and through it the channel proceeds to Ster- ling, where is found four hundred and nine feet of drift and the rock floor many feet below the present face of Lake Erie. From this you see the chan- nel's decline from Loudonville to Sterling, and the Black fork from Mansfield follows an old preglacial bed, having the same general decline to Loudon- ville, while the Jerome fork from Ashland, the Muddy fork from Rowsburgh. the Little Killbuck from West Salem and the reversed Killbuck from Millers- burgh all show a similar descent into the axial channel-the Old Mohican. The continental divide leaves Richland county near Independence, passes irregu- larly through Holmes county to Chestnut ridge, between the Black and Wolf creeks, here crosses Killbuck and proceeds to the south of Baltic, Ragersville and Dundee, and connects with the divide noted by Frank Leverett as cross- ing the Big Sugar creek between Strausburgh and Canal Dover. So the rim of the elongated bowl commenced near Garden Isle in the "Harrisville Swamp," and included West Salem, Polk, Ashland, Mansfield, Bellville, Kill- buck, Dundee, Massillon, Warwick and practically ended at the River Styx and the preglacial drainage lines from this crest of highest hills all converged to a central axis-the Old Mohican.

Those from the island side have been noted, and I will now briefly indi- cate the principal ones from the carboniferous side. The first on the west was a small channel coming in just south of Loudonville and draining the high hills of Hanover township; it is now crossed by the new bed of the Clear fork. Drake's valley, from Nashville to Lakeville, marks the line of the second. The third drained the limestone hills of Ripley township and en- tered the main waterway just west of Shreve. This takes us to the south exposure of the limestone ridge of Ripley township, and all its waters were directed by the dip of the rock to the Paint Valley channel, which started near Nashville and entered the Killbuck near Holmesville. The next and princi- pal tributary is the great Killbuck channel, in which the waters are now reversed from the col at Killbuck village. This valley gradually widens and deepens until it enters the Old Mohican between Wooster and Shreve. The sixth channel is a smaller one, coming in between coal hills, two miles south of Millersburgh. The seventh comes in through a fissure between Holmesville and Holmes county infirmary. It is now occupied in part by Martin's creek. The channel is wide and two hundred feet deep. The eighth

WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.

in order drained a large part of Salt Creek and Paint townships in both Wayne and Holmes counties, and the valley is probably of more importance to the people of Wayne county than all the others combined, for it furnishes a series of flowing wells of purest water. Its head is represented by Dry run, passing down a fissure between the hills southwest of the south branch of Salt creek, and ended in the Salt creek valley near the tile factory, below Freder- icksburgh. At this point is located the col in the big Salt creek, and over this broken-down col the waters now go tearing over a rocky bed and be- tween rock hills to Holmesville, where the debris is landed in beautiful ter- races. From Fredericksburgh the old channel passed almost due north to old Edinburgh, where it was joined by a preglacial channel coming in from Kidron by Apple creek. It then took a northwest direction through the val- ley of the Apple creek to Honeytown, where it entered the Old Mohican. The ninth is the mysterious Big Sugar creek, a reversed stream, the col being near the falls below Beach City. The next is Newman's creek, that the Pittsburg, Fort Wayne & Chicago railroad follows from Massillon to Orrville. The eleventh is represented by Patton's lake, Fox lake and Red run. The twelfth is represented by Chippewa creek, now forming the west head of the Tuscarawas, which is known to be a reversed stream from near Strausburgh.

Here I must call your attention to a feature in the location of these pre- glacial channels that will assist you in determining the necessity of the axial channel or Old Mohican, and it will be better understood by referring to the accompanying map, viz. : All the channels described enter the axial channel through fissures or gorges in the hills that deepen and widen as they proceed from the hills to their mouths, and this explains the mystery of Sugar creek, Newman's creek and Chippewa creek, whose waters now trend out, but in preglacial times flowed in. Their mouths were filled with drift to a point above their source, and the streams of necessity reversed. Newman's creek, which now empties into the Tuscarawas near Massillon, is the remains of an old glacial marsh, with its widest end opening into the Old Mohican, and it seems plain that this "Shades of Death," as the pioneers called it, marks the line of a preglacial channel trending north and west. The Chippewa creek channel is, from a geological and glaciological standpoint, the most important of all, for it has been surmised that the Old Mohican went through this channel to Warwick, and then by the Copley marsh to the Cuyahoga, and thence to Lake Erie. My first objection to this is that I have found another and better way through which the waters could pass, and my second objection is based on geological and physical principles. The Chippewa

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History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I, Part 7

Author: Publication date: 1910 Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen Number of Pages: 1162

Author:
Publication date: 1910
Publisher: Indianapolis : B.F. Bowen
Number of Pages: 1162