History of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 2

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1893
Publisher: Chicago : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1532

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HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

"Huge trees were growing out of the embankment when the white people began to clear the flats for cultivation. It is oval, as is still manifest from the segment exhibited on the upper part, formed by the remaining rampart and fosse, the chord of the arc being the division fence. The Wilkes-Barre fortification is about eighty rods from the river, toward which a gate opened, and the earliest set- tlers concur in stating that a well existed in the interior, near the southern line.

"On the bank of the river there is an Indian burying place; not a barrow or hill, such as is described by Mr. Jefferson, but where graves have been dug and the deceased laid, horizontally, in regular rows. In excavating the canal, cutting through the bank that borders the flats, perhaps thirty rods south from the fort, was another burying place disclosed, evidently more ancient; for the bones almost imme- diately crumbled to dust on exposure to the air, and the deposits were far more numerous than in that near the river. By the representation of James Stark, the skeletons were countless, and the deceased had been buried in a sitting posture. In a considerable portion of the bank, though scarcely a bone remained of sufficient firmness to be lifted up, the closeness and position of the buried were apparent from the discoloration of the earth. In this place of deposit no beads were found, while they were common in that near the river."

The most recent discoveries of archeologists have unearthed evidences of lost nations that passed away at least 5,000 years ago; peoples that had organized governments and complete systems of religion, with a written picture language; nations or peoples dying of old age and slow decay fifty centuries ago. Did they, think you, like us, delve with curious interest for the lost remains of their prede- cessors ?

Indians .- This name came from the discoverers of this continent who did not know it was the Western Hemisphere. Their place in history that treats of civilization is a negative one. The race when we found it in the thirteenth century was mentally petrified, and the only good thing it could do the world was to pass out of it as quickly as possible. Fate so ordained that it stood in the path of the ever-advancing, bloody and all-conquering white man. The native savage had no history, and had he remained here undisturbed indefinitely he would have made no more than the same idle, childish traditions that he possessed when Colum- bus first sighted our shores. He was in the act of dying out when we found him, and it is probable that the white man's coming, with all its supposed wrongs to these forest children, tended far more to prolong that people's existence on the earth than to hurry them to unmarked graves. He was but a filthy cannibal, and the seeds of decay were within. No lengthened existence on earth would have ever caused the Indian to invent soap, the lever that lifts mankind from the wallow to the purer air and sweeter sunshine. If his nature had ever possessed possibilities of good they had given way many generations before we knew him to the baser heredities of the serpent and the ferocious wild beast. In these he was caked and mentally was petrified-cunning, cruel, hopelessly and helplessly ignorant. The only history there is of the American Indians of any intelligent interest now to us is the short story of their contact with civilization and futile struggles to beat it back or to live in new and strange environment. The Indians built no mounds nor enduring pyramids for after-coming races to wonder at and construct imaginative stories of their numbers, wealth and evident advancement; they proposed to leave no traces for future archeologists to hunt for their "lost arts." While this may be disappointing to the delver in the musty kingdom of the dead yester- days, to the more practical philosopher it reveals the best thing ascertainable of the Indian's nature. He was his own master; he loved his liberty better than his life; he was not and would not be a slave. That is the pre-eminent mark of the Indian character. You might cage him and so you might the eagle, while neither could be made to do base service, both would die of broken hearts. "Born in the wild-

HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

wood, rocked on the wave," he would be free. Between death and a task-master he had no instant of hesitation in his choice. Some need of genuine admiration is due the wild savage here. It was that deep-seated love of liberty that is the most ennobling trait in human nature. He possessed a religious faith, but crawled upon his belly before no miserable fetich. His god lived across the mountains and was a great hunter and warrior, who would welcome every brave as a brother hunter in the land of plenteous game. He constructed his god after his own fashion-a fel- low hunter and never a master.

The only history due the Indians is where he came in contact with the pioneer, and as such it will be found in this volume where it tells of the struggles and trials of the conquering race that came and possessed this now rich and teeming land.

The mammoth, the mastodon and the huge hairy elephant once roamed over all this continent. There were, too, here lizards so enormous of size that we can now merely conjecture their outlines. The remains of the hairy elephant with long curl- ing tusks were recently found in Siberia where they had remained frozen in the ice for thousands of years, the flesh so well kept that the dogs ate it readily when uncov- ering the remains. All these monsters were of tropical habitat. The species passed away, so did the unknown races of men. Human, animal and vegetable life in kind and species come and go with the fleeting ages and the slight traces of existence that we find are only of the most modern who precede us. Our vision backward is short and uncertain, before us is the dark wall jutting up against our very noses.

But antedating all this varied human and animal life were the infinitely more powerful factors in shaping the world's destiny-the glaciers that ground their way over this continent-the world builders, fashioning the face of the earth preparatory to our occupancy. These slow flowing rivers, or rather seas of solid ice moving over the land with resistless force, leveling the mountain of granite, grinding the hille to dust, turning the course of rivers, filling the inland seas and making water beds of the seat of the mountain range. The glacial rocks are found in all por- tions of the northern hemisphere. Glaciers now exist and are flowing in many parts, but particularly in Switzerland, the solid ice, miles in thickness, moving at annual perceptible rate. The power behind these glaciers is to our finite minds wholly inconceivable. These crystal ships were the first that ever came to this portion of the world. No commander walked their glittering decks, and yet those vessels with gleaming splendors refracting the colors of the rainbow, brought here much of the surface deposit of nature as man first found it. These ice visitations were no doubt regular and a most necessary part of the preparation for man's final coming. They moved always from the north to the south, and thus run the mountain ranges and the great continental rivers. When our hemisphere rose dripping from the bottom of the sea the highest point would be the central ridge or backbone of the eleva- tion running with the lines of longitude, and then the natural flow of the waters would be to the east and to the west. This is verified by the course of the dead rivers recently discovered. We can liken these wonderful ice movements to nothing so well as the world's finishing sand paper- the mere polish of a round world by the hand of the supreme Master.

Geological .- The first great interest to man is the geology of his habitat. This and climate are the controlling factors of his being, the development of communities and the rise and spread of civilization. Within the vegetable and the animal is always a prepotency toward the better and stronger life. This is the struggle for existence, and primarily the beginnings of life are in the soil and climate. In the adjustment of climates birds and fishes became migratory, as in their simple phys- ical formation this was of first importance. Wingless land animals could not migrate with the seasons and their physical natures became more complex, and ever ascending until man crowned creation with his presence; first in the tropics and in the course of ages he became a migratory animal, ever tending in his movements

HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

toward a northern temperate zone until his bounding complex nature imperatively required for its full development something of the extremes of heat and cold, -- variety of climate, as well as variety of soils, the stubborn and severe mixed with the ever warm and the sometimes coy soils. In other words all nature's products are lazy-man the most of all, and to grow, to develop the best energies, to have life at all that is worth the living, he must struggle for it. The storm-winds drive the roots of the tree deep in the ground, gripping with their gnarled fingers, as a vice, everything they touch. Where nature fills all the requirements of animal life there are the songless birds and the persistent, ignorant savage man. Hence from the temperate belt running round the world has come all better civilizations, all superior intelligence. Extremes of climate whether of cold or heat stunt both the body and the mind, but there is more force inherently in the little Jakuts of the north than there is in the giant Patagonians. The ability to think therefore comes largely of soil and climate. The home of the higher civilization is marked by the corn and the cotton; one of the inhospitable spots of the earth being the shores of the North sea-damp, cold and forever dreary-a land of rain and fog and storm, where the waters trench forever upon the land and where the smiling sun seldom goes, yet this was the breeding ground for the world's dominating races of men. The hardy sailors upon treacherous waters, on rude log rafts, braved the storms and driven by starvation became navigators and then pirates, and from pirates to war- riors and from warriors to conquerors and they swarmed out and possessed the known earth and pitilessly enslaved their captives or in mercy ate them. The North sea and the Black Woods had received the tender, tropical, lazy man, and grafted upon this stem its own grim and pitiless energies, bleaching his skin and hair to greatest whiteness, and this animal, hungry, fierce, fearless and sleepless, went out in packs like starving wolves and made tribute of the habitable world. No other animal was ever so inherently savage, and he grew to be a warrior, a fighter by instinct. and then he invented gunpowder, as a matter of imperative necessity, and in time from fighting his brother when he could find no common enemy, he grew from cunning to invention, from invention to investigation, and benign phi- losophy dawned from a world's long travail.

The long and slow development of the race has gone on in its fierce, blind strug- gles-never by scientific, but always by the bloodiest methods. And never a moment since the morning stars sang together has there not been the inviting way to produce both the pessimist and the optimist. The course of civilization has ever been upward, but spirally so. Man struggles and dies, and when he is hastily returned to mother earth there are others to take his place, struggle and die in their turn. There is no time nor place for him to be gentle and good until he is dead. The resistless energies of nature never intermit, and it seems they are merely fate that through fire and blood drive him forever on and on. Cold and hunger develop or create his activities-all his wonderful energies, and he is so constituted that he will only expand and rise when beat upon by the adverse winds and his lazy hopes are riven as by the thunderbolt.

" Life, love and loss-three steps From cradle to the grave; three steps and then, Like little tired children in the lap Of onr great mother earth sleep."

The absence of the training and education that would best fit men to live has cost the human race ages of severest travail -- a river of woe and wrong forever run- ning round the world; a raging, swollen stream, whirling, plunging and all engulf- ing. And ignorant man has suffered and dreamed and lived on in the throes of death. Look upon this little spot of earth, bounded by your short imperfect vision! When civilized man looked upon it, he could see no more than the little of the sur-

HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

face that the untutored savage had long made familiar. He knew his squaw could girdle the trees and plant the few seeds and the earth would yield a thousand fold. The white man could see no more than this. In even the first wave of immigrants to the Susquehanna there were men of the higher education of the day. But this school-man knew not his environment so well as the practiced, illiterate hunter, and his life was far more difficult. There was a misfit in the man, his education and environment. His knowledge of economical geology came wholly of the Mosaic account of creation-the literal six days and the job was a completed and a finished world. His school had not taught him that all and everything he can possess and enjoy in this world comes primarily of the rocks, bursting from the earth to meet and be kissed by the wind, the rain and the sunshine. Here is the source of life- the everlasting foundation of real education. A knowledge of the fundamentals of geology would have told him the transcendent story of the future visible on the surface, but far more deeply impressed by the secrets that lay hid under the sur- face. Life springs from the earth and here are the never-ending treasures to all who can see them and appropriate them. Some knowledge of the fundamentals of geology, even though slight, would have saved our pioneer ancestors the monstrous pains and penalties that for half a century was their chief heritance. Then they would have known at once that which they had to learn by at least fifty years of bit- ter experience.

The geologist looks beneath as well as upon the earth's surface. Understands the rocks and soils, he knows on slight inspection not only whence they came, but what in the way of minerals or valuable materials are their accompaniment. The earth is fretted with ever new budding life, all coming and going by the unvarying laws of nature. There is to-day, as in the long centuries past, a brooding uncer- tainty in the parent's mind over the education of children. The fault is not in the parent, if fault there be. Education should be a certain science; unfortunately it is not, and is hardly tending that way. No more now than hundreds of years ago can people know the outcome of all efforts at schooling. In the household, under the family roof-tree, are the best men's highest hopes and ambitions. If he could be · absolutely certain in matters of educating the young; know when he started his child off to school that he was not venturing, not merely trying an experiment, what a sheet anchor this would be to those myriads of rudderless vessels in the sweeping storms. He, as it is, simply feels his own imperfect education-shuts his eyes and sends his children to the hired man to receive knowledge and the ferule.

This wonderful valley geologically extends from Shickshinny to Carbondale, a distance of fifty miles. Its topographical appearance, as viewed from Prospect Rock, is that of a spacious vale, fading on both hands into the hazy distance. The anomoly is the course of the river which is entirely independent of the strata- graphical structure of the region. North of Pittston, it cuts transversely through the mountain and carves for itself a course over the coal measures as far as Nanti- coke, where, passing through a notch in the conglomerate, it enters the region of red shale and continues in that course until at Shickshinny it again breaks at right angles across the end of the mountain rage. The hight of the river above the tide is 540 feet and the adjacent mountains from 700 feet to 1,500 feet higher. What is the Northern coal field is a long concave basin from Carbondale and extending north fifty miles; a mile wide at Carbondale and over five miles wide at Kingston, the place of greatest width. The floor of this basin is the Mammoth red stone which is about 800 feet below the sea level, but rising to an outcrop at slope 2 of the Kingston Coal company and at the Hollenback slope below Prospect Rock. The Pottsville conglomerate roofs the coal beds. And around every coal bed is the Pocono sandstone, and between these two ridges is a thick bed of Mauch Chunk red shale which is eroded into a narrow valley. All the strata of this region that comes to the surface belongs to the paleozoic era and to the Devonian and car-

HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

boniferous periods. The Catskill formation is found in the Kingston mountains and here and there the rich plant food bearing soft Chemung rock. These strata are of variable thickness, and can be all easily found at Campbell's Ledge. A straight line from Harvey's lake to Bear creek would show all the way first the Catskill sand- stone, and along Toby's creek would find the Chemung. On the northern side of Kingston mountain we find the Pocono sandstone. There ought to be here, as next, the red shale, but it is absent; crossing this we find the Pottsville conglomerate, and crossing this come the outcrops of the coal measures with fourteen well-defined viens of coal, traversing the drift formations of the flats. Ascending Wilkes-Barre mountain again, we pass over the coal outcrop and reach the mountain's conglomer- ate summit, cross a narrow valley in the shale and arrive at the great Pocono plateau and thus to Bear creek. In the seismic disturbances this spot was more remote from its greatest movements than the basins of Carbon or Schuylkill coun- ties. Therefore its general character is that of one great synclinal, the coal seams outcropping on each side before they reach their proper anticlinal. The floor of this carboniferous trough is not symmetrical. It is crumpled into many rolls that run in long diagonals across the basin in nearly parallel lines, forming, as it were, many smaller or local basins. The number of small anticlinals existing in the sub- strata is consequently great, and many of them are detected only with great difficulty. These saddles as they approach Carbondale diverge more and more from the general direction of the valley, but become proportionately smaller in the steep- ness of their anticlinals with each advancing wave. The anticlinals which originate on the southern mountain become sharper as they approach the center of the valley and die out along the line of the Susquehanna. The anticlinals originating in the northern hills are supposed to have the same characteristics, but owing to the immense accumulations of drift on the surface, the topographical evidences are but meager. The geological survey describes forty of these troughs, and each of these, it should be borne in mind, is marked by a secondary series of anticlinals, which though but slightly seen in a map are of vast importance in a mine.

Coal .- The thickness of the coal measures varies greatly. The deepest part of the basin is in the vicinity of the Dundee shaft, near Nanticoke, where 1, 700 feet of . coal strata is developed. The names of the principal seams as they are met in descending No. 4 shaft of the Kingston Coal company, with their average thickness, are as follows: Orchard vein, 42 feet; Lance vein, 63 feet; Hillman vein, 10 feet; Five Foot vein, 5 feet: Four Foot vein, 4 feet; Six Foot vein, 6 feet; Eleven Foot vein, 11 feet; Cooper vein, 72 feet; Bennett vein, 12 feet; Ross vein, 10 feet; Red Ash vein, 9 feet.

The total thickness of coal is therefore ninety feet. The material in these veins is softer than the strata of the southern basin, but nevertheless it is identical in for- mation. Professor White says: "Although Wilkes-Barre and Hazleton are distant from each other over twenty miles the same coal beds can be recognized at the two places, showing that they once spanned the wide rock-arch of the Wapwallopen valley; that all the coal fields were once united; that the slow erosion of ages has spared to us but a small fraction of the black diamonds which must have once covered far more than the whole area of the State of Pennsylvania." The stupendous force of these eroding agencies is shown by the presence of the fine striae on Penobscot Knob, which is 2, 220 feet high and is only nine miles north of the edge of the ter- minal moraine. Near the same summit, on the Catskill sandstone, is a large white bowlder of Pottsville conglomerate, measuring 9x6x4} feet, that was evidently lauded there by a glacier that still towered above that point possibly miles. The phenomena of the glacial age, difficult as they are to read with certainty, are not any more difficult of interpretation than the deposits of the paleozoic era. The Pottsville conglomerate is the rock cradle which holds the coal. Why is it that this millstone grit at Tamaqua is 1,191 feet thick and at Wilkes-Barre but ninety-six

6 Dorrance

COL CHAPLES DORFANCE PRECOOF WALLTHIG NATIONAL BANII WILKE - BAFFE, FA

HISTORY OF LUZERNE COUNTY.

feet thick ? Many theories concerning this are advanced, but they are mere conject- ures. Everywhere in the anthracite regions this variation occurs. Professor Lesley says: "The variable thickness of the conglomerate must be discussed on one or two hypotheses: either we must surmise extraordinary and unaccountable variations in the quality of the sand and gravel deposited on neighboring parts or red shale sea bottom, or we must apply the mechanical law, that the folding of a plastic mass shifts all parts of the mass to allow of its accommodation in a smaller space." The history of the development of the coal interest of this locality will be found in a succeeding chapter.

Drainage .- The main artery in the Susquehanna river and its affluents, as it winds its way nearly centrally through the county, entering from the north where the three counties join-Wyoming. Lackawanna and Luzerne-and passing out at the southwest on the dividing line between Nescopeck and Salem townships. The Lehigh river forms the southeast line of the county and its confluents, form- ing the county line from Lackawanna to where it turns south into Carbon county. Commencing at the north line of the county the principal streams that empty into the Susquehanna river are first, Sutton's creek, which rises at Cummings pond in Franklin township and runs nearly east to the river at Sutton's island. Below this is Abraham's creek, emptying at Wyoming. Toby creek is south of this and reaches the river at Kingston. The next is Harvey creek, draining Harvey lake and, going south, falls into the river at West Nanticoke. This is joined by Pikes creek in Jackson township. This lake was named for Benjamin Harvey, who located near its junction in 1775. Then is Hunlock's creek, heading in Ross township and strikes the river a short distance below West Nanticoke. The next is Shickshinny creek, its spreading branches draining the west part of Union township; Hunting- ton creek rises in Lake township, passing into Ross township and joins Kitchen's creek near the south line of Fairmount township, and, after joining, flows southwest and into Columbia county through Huntington township. Green creek runs south nearly parallel with the county line from Fairmount through the west side of Hunt- ington township. Bowman's creek rises in Fairmount township and runs northeast into Wyoming county. In the northwest corner of the county are the head waters of Mahoopany creek, which flows northeast through Wyoming county.

Commencing at the north again the first stream entering the Susquehanna from the east is the Lackawanna river, which joins the main stream just above or at Pitts- ton. This runs a southwesterly course from the crossing of the county line. Then going south is Gardiner's creek, which rises in Pittston township, flows west and southerly and falls into Mill creek in Plains township. Mill creek, so called because the first mills in 1772 were erected on it, has its rise also in Pittston town- ship and flows in nearly a parallel line westerly with Gardiner's creek, and falls into the river a little more than a mile north of Wilkes-Barre. Then is Long Pond creek, which runs westerly along the south base of the Wyoming mountains, through Round Pond and Long Pond and empties into Little Wapwallopen about a mile from the river.

Little Wapwallopen rises in one branch in Triangular pond in Wright town- ship and passes through Dorrance and Hollenback township and reaches the river at the old ferry road.

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History of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, with biographical selections, Part 2

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.) Publication date: 1893 Publisher: Chicago : S. B. Nelson Number of Pages: 1532

Author: Bradsby, H. C. (Henry C.)
Publication date: 1893
Publisher: Chicago : S. B. Nelson
Number of Pages: 1532