USA > Pennsylvania > Tioga County > History of Tioga County, Pennsylvania, with Illustrations, portraits and sketches of prominent families and individuals > Part 20
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Such in the main are the salient features in the topog- raphy of Tioga county. But perhaps the reader will think that the valley wherein he dwells, which has changed so little within his memory; that the hill which rises behind his home,
" Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,"
that these, with all their varied outline of surface, are essentially the same as when they came from the hand of the Creator. But whoever entertains such a belief cannot be a close observer of nature. He who is the first great cause has set certain forces at work which have never ceased to operate through countless ages. Marvel not therefore when I tell you that the active agent in scooping out every valley in the county, from that of the largest river, cut down five hundred or a thousand feet, down to that of the smallest rill, is the stream flowing at its bottom.
largely the result of the same causes. The existing in- equalities have followed the action of erosive agents upon sedimentary rocks; while the inclination of the strata, which lie in the form of anticlinal and synclinal waves, together with the alternations of hard and soft beds, have in a great measure controlled and tended to modify the effects of this wearing process. As I under- stand it, the sediments which now constitute our rocks were in a nearly horizontal condition at the time of their deposition in the ancient Appalachian ocean. But the contraction of a cooling globe, by which the surface has been forced, through lateral pressure, to accommodate itself to a smaller space, has resulted in folding and crimping the strata, and thus elevating the Appalachian Mountains. This action of internal forces through every age since the coal, taken in connection with subse- quent erosion, has given rise to that principal feature in the topography of Tioga county-namely, long ranges of synclinal mountains, with their intervening anticlinal valleys, running in a northeast and southwest direction.
We will now turn to the rocks which underlie the country we have thus briefly described. We will begin with the lowest rocks which reach the surface, and de- scribe the formations in the ascending order, when it will be seen that the geology of Tioga county is wonderfully simple.
The Chemung is the lowest formation in the county. It is the surface rock in all three of the great anticlinal valleys, except along their borders, near the synclinal mountains, where, owing to the dip, it begins to be over- laid by the Red Catskill formation. It consists of shale and sandstone, with bands of calcareous rock. The color is gray, bluish, and greenish, with some of an olive and some of a reddish tint. It is a thousand feet thick in the Chatham-Farmington Valley, seven hundred in the Mansfield and Wellsboro Valley, and three hundred in the Liberty Valley. Only the upper part of the Chemung is visible in Tioga county, the lower part coming to the surface farther north, in the State of New York. It is everywhere loaded with fossil remains, consisting for the most part of marine shells, though fish and plant remains are not wanting. The characteristic shells are Spirifer disjunctus and S. mesacostalis : Productus hirsuta, P. Boydii, P. speciosa, P. arctostriata, and P. rarispina; Athyris an- gelica, Rhynchonella contracta, Streptorhynchus pandora, Atrypa spinosa, Mytilarca Chemungensis, Grammysia elliptica, Pteronites Chemungensis, Orthis impressa, Ed- mondia Burlingtonensis, Ambococlia umbonata, Avicul- opecten rugae, Leiorhynchus mesacostalis, Strophodouta Car- uta and S. perplana. There are others, but these are among the most common. They are not usually all found in any one place, but some in one place and some in another.
86
HISTORY OF TIOGA COUNTY.
The bones ot fishes are occasionally met with, scattered here and there through the rocks. They often retain their natural color, and appear to have belonged to fishes of large size, but widely different from the finny tribes of the present day. Perhaps the nearest approach to them is found in the gar-pike and the sturgeon. When old ocean was here it must have teemed with this ichthyic life, if we may judge from the numerous remains of this character, especially in some of the iron ore beds. The plant remains are of a Carboniferous type, and in- dicate the approach of that gorgeous flora which mantled the earth in the time of the coal. Of these, the stems of reed-like plants are perhaps the most abundant, al- though ferns and lycopodites are not unknown, while fucoids are rather common.
One of the most extensive outcrops in the Mansfield and Wellsboro valley occurs on Pine Creek, along the road to Round Islands, where three hundred feet or more of Chemung rocks are exposed, containing fossils. They must be declining to the southwest, for even the top of this thick mass is not visible at Leetonia, in the deep vale of Cedar Creek. But they are visible at the forks of Elk Run, in the New Bergen Valley. Sandy, shaly, and calcareous beds of a gray and bluish color and containing fossils are exposed around Wellsboro, as in the hill north of the village and along the railroad be- low the depot. Half a mile south of Stony Fork, on the site of an old salt lick, a well has been bored three hun- dred feet deep for salt. A stream of water issues from it, enough to fill a two inch pipe, which is quite strongly
on the Wilson estate, and 528 feet above the river, near the top of Pickle Hill, where it has been mined to con- siderable extent for the Mansfield furnace. Here at one place, near the school-house, it contains nearly 43 per cent. of iron. The northern dip takes it beneath the river at Lamb's Creek. The same bed has been mined extensively about three miles from Mansfield, on the road to Wellsboro. Several thousand tons of ore from this bank have been manufactured into iron since the year 1854. It is from two to three feet in thickness, and is characterized here as everywhere by its numerous fossils, mostly Spirifer and Productus. It contains about 39 per cent. of iron. Not far from the horizon of this ore, on a hill about a mile north of Mansfield, there is a bed of limestone six feet in thickness, which has been used in the iron works, and which contains about 29 per cent. of lime, and about 23 per cent. of carbonic acid, and may in time become valuable as a fertilizer. It is made up in large part of comminuted sea shells, ground up and broken into fragments by the waves. The upper Chemung also contains beds which will fur- nish good flagging. A flagstone quarry has been opened on a hill a mile and a half north of Mainsburg, which
Exposures of Chemung rocks are frequent. One of the best in the Liberty Valley is on a small stream run- ning into the Roaring Branch from the north, about a mile above Green's saw-mill, where the rocks are dip- ping at a high angle to the south. A good deposit of iron ore comes to the surface in the main road a mile southeast of Ogden's Corners. There are four beds in a space of thirty feet, ranging in thickness from eight inches has gained considerable celebrity. Stones of great for the thinnest up to four feet for the thickest or upper- most bed. Two of the beds,-aggregating two feet and over, lie ten feet below the upper bed and twelve feet above the lower one, and are separated from each other by only twenty inches of rock. They can be worked as one bed. But the upper bed is the best, containing as it does over 39 per cent. of iron; while the middle beds together contain about 34 per cent., and the lower bed about 29 per cent. breadth and smoothness have been obtained here and sent away in large quantities. But that Chemung rocks should ever have been thought to contain anthracite coal seems almost incredible. Yet the " Arienio shaft " in Charleston, a quarter of a mile south of Dartt Settle- ment, excavated, it is said, at an expense of more than $10,000, will long remain to testify that such was once the case. The excitement over this ignis fatuus was continued through months and even years; a day was set apart for a basket picnic, when speeches were to be made and the coal opened. It is needless to say that no coal was ever found.
In the Chatham. Farmington Valley some good ex- posures of Chemung rocks may be seen on Waddell's Brook, in Clymer; on Elkhorn Creek, in Tioga and Farmington; along the Cowanesque Railroad, two miles west of Lawrenceville; and along the Tioga Railroad, opposite the village of Tioga. At the last named lo- cality nearly eight hundred feet of rocks are visible. It is probably the finest exposure of Chemung strata in the county, and was visited in 1841 by Sir Charles Lyell, one of England's greatest geologists. The beds are rich in organic remains. In the Elkhorn rocks the writer has discovered a new genus of ganoid fishes, impregnated with salt. Important beds of iron ore are which Dr. Newberry has described under the name of
Heliodus, in the Geology of Ohio. None of the iron ores mentioned above have been found in the Chatham-
found in this valley, but mostly in the eastern part of the county. They occur in at least three different horizons, all in the upper Chemung. The lowest of Farmington Valley so far as is known, except around these is in the river bed about three-quarters of a mile the head waters of Long Run, in Clymer township. In below Mansfield. The thickness of this bed is unknown, Jackson the surface is strewn in many places with sandstone boulders, mostly a coarse gritty rock, weather- ing white, and belonging probably in the horizon of the Chemung conglomerate.
as doubtless some of it has been eroded by the river, so that less than a foot remains where it is visible. This, however, is remarkably rich, containing over 43 per cent. of iron, and is characterized by small flattened pebbles of
The Red Catskill formation overlies the Chemung, quartz imbedded in it. One hundred and sixty feet above making a red border to all the anticlinal valleys, and a this bed, on the Wilson estate, is another which is 16 red frame in the base and sides of the synclinal moun- inches thick, and characterized by a peculiar seedy or tains.
It consists of red shale and sandstone, bluish oolitic structure, while it contains over 31 per cent. of iron. shale and gray sandstone. The sandstone is nearly all It is regarded as the equivalent of the bed worked on false-bedded. Red is the predominating color, both of Whipple's Hill, and on Bixby's Hill, where it contains over the rocks and of the soil resulting from their disinteg- 35 per cent. of iron; also of the bed opened at Roseville, ration. The thickness varies from say two hundred feet Austinville, etc .; evidence of which is found in the fish in the Cowanesque Mountain to three hundred or more remains so common to this bed. The Roseville ore con- in the Mill Creek-Pine Creek Mountain and four hundred tains about 42 per cent. of iron. The third or upper horizon is 375 feet above the bed mentioned as occurring or more in the Blossburg Mountain. The fossils are principally fish and plant remains, with some of the
37
GEOLOGICAL FORMATIONS.
Chemung shell- in the lower part. Several different genera of armor-clad fishes are represented, of which stones, with occaslend binns of sud lede, white one Holoftychius appears to have been the most abundant. stratum is a peculiar frecepolice limestone. The sand- stones are false-bir died: The thickness etles from say five hundred feet @ Wir Cowanesine Mountain to
There are bones, scales and teeth, usually in the most perfect state of perservation, the enamel of the teeth and scales often retaining something of its original lustre. The six hundred feet in the Mill Creek-Pine Creek Mount- scales of some species are a quarter of an inch in diame- ter; of others two inches or more: while some of the teeth are an inch in length. These wonderful fishes have been invested with additional interest for all time to come through the glowing descriptions of the lamented Hugh Miller.
The typical locality of Red Catskill rocks in the Bloss- burg Mountain is along the railroad midway between Blossburg and Covington. It is known as " Red Rock." and is noted for abundant fossils of the kind named above, more than a ton of which I have myself obtained.
These strata are well exposed in the Mill Creek . Pine Creek Mountain on Seeley Creek, a branch of Lamb's Creek, four miles northwest of Mansfield. Chemung shells are found pretty high up among the red beds at this place; while fish remains are abundant in the upper part of the ravine, in red shale with calcareous layers. Holoptychius, Bothriolepis, Dipterus and other large ganoid fishes are represented. Dipterus Sherwoodi from this locality is the first relic of that genus found on this continent, and is named in honor of the discoverer by Dr. John S. Newberry, in the Geology of Ohio, Vol. II. Part II, Palaontology, page 61. Another good exposure occurs on Shutter's Hill, above the railroad, southeast of Tioga. The so-called " Hathaway ore," said to com. bine new and wonderful properties, gives interest to this locality. But that no ore or mineral of any value whatever exists at this spot is perfectly certain; and the time and money spent in honey-combing the hill with shafts and trenches is time and money wasted. A. S. McCreath, State chemist at Harrisburg, has written to me as follows:
" The specimen of ' Hathaway ore' you sent to this laboratory has been analyzed with the following results: " Silica, . 59.630
" Alumina,
18.560
" Sesqui-oxide of iron,
8.571
"Sesqui-oxide of manganese, .290
" Lime, . .672
" Magnesia
2.252
" Potash and soda,
5.109
"Sulphuric acid,
.123
" Phosphoric acid, .279
" Titanic acid,. trace
" Water, ..
4.560
100.046
" The analysis shows that it is simply a ferruginous slate, containing the ordinary constituents of that rock, with a mere trace of titanic acid. The analysis has been very thorough and satisfactory. Nothing exists in the slate aside from what is mentioned in the above table. It contains no gold, silver, mercury, copper, tellurium or palladium. I have likewise examined with great care certain alloys, so-called, which have been forwarded to me by Mr. G. W. Hathaway and Mr. T. G. Hall, and have made : pecial tests for a 'new metal ' which they claim to have discovered. It scarcely seems necessary to say that I have found nothing unusual in these sub- stances. They are not alloys; unless an exceedingly silicious, cold-short white cast iron can be termed an alloy. I have been especially careful in the examination of these substances, on account of the local interest manifested in the subject."
The Red Catskill is succeeded by the Gray Catskill or Vespertine, extending well up the sides of the synclinal
mountains. It is mantposed of Thin-be hled gray sand-
ain and seven hundred In the Bossburg Mountain The carbonized remains ofglints allied to those of the coal are occasionally met with in the thin, gray and flaggy sandstones, but no shells They are usually in a frag- mentary condition, as if broken and ground up by waves and streams before they were floated off and deposited at the bottom of the sea, where they were imbedded in
sand. At the very top of this formation is sometimes found a thin seam of coal mixed with fire clay, as on the north branch of Painter Run, in Tioga township.
Above the Gray Catskill occurs a second series of red rocks, called the Umbral. It is composed largely of red shale, so soft that they do not often reach the surface, though we may know of their presence by the color of the overlying soil. With the shales are beds of greenish -gray sandstones; while toward the top are black and dark colored slates and slaty sandstone, with such plants as Calamit . Lepidodendren, etc., and sometimes a thin seam of coal. Beneath the above is also found a bed of ar- gillaceous iron ore, which is five feet thick on Painter Run, and was formerly mined at Blossburg.
The Coal is the last and highest of the rock formations, and is only found in places along the center line of the synclinal mountains, as in the Blossburg and Pine Creek coal regions. The coal measures consist of alternations of sandstone and shale with seams of coal, all together ag- gregating 225 feet in the Gaines coal basin and 275 in the Blossburg basin. The formation was ushered in with the coal conglomerate, from 30 to 60 feet thick, boulders of which are scattered far and wide. It is a coarse, gritty, white and quartzose sandstone, filled in some places with pebbles of quartz. Wherever this rock reaches the surface the scenery is almost always highly picturesque. East of the Tioga River, on Painter Run, it caps the mountains; and west of Niles Valley, at " the sand-bed barrens," large masses have disintegrated, forming beds of pure white sand. The coal is repre- sented by eight or ten different veins, separated by in- tervals of rock, generally some kind of sandstone or shale, and all in a vertical section of from two to three hundred feet. These veins are not always all present in one place, but some of them are often wanting. Only three of them are persistent and can be said to have any commercial value, viz .. the Bloss coal. the Seymour coal and the Bear Creek coal, in the Blossburg region: and about the same number of veins in the Gaines region. .The coal at Blossburg was first developed by Aaron Bloss, a man by the name of Clements, and another by the name of Knapp; that at Gaines by Henry Baker and a man by the name of Hurd. The Bloss vem has thus far supplied nearly all the coal shipped to market. Perhaps originally the finest natural exposure of coal measures in the county was in Coal Run, at Blossburg. Before any mining was done there some of the lowest beds of coal were visible, together with a bed of sandstone filled with the remains of a strange and wonderful vegetation, which flourished ages before man appeared. How different were the conditions then, when plants of a tropical character found here a congenial home; where in place of hill and valley, a " great dismal swamp " extended for miles and miles ! To some it may be a matter of wonder how beds of coal were formed, one above another, and having a lateral extent of many miles; and probably few who sit before their fenders and toast their moc-
88
HISTORY OF TIOGA COUNTY.
casins have ever stopped to consider the origin of coal. But it is no longer to be doubted that coal is of vegetable origin, because it consists of vegetable tissues, while the accompanying shales and sand- stones contain numerous roots, leaves and trunks of trees. The peculiar conditions under which it was pro- duced were doubtless similar to those existing in the peat bogs of our own time, only on a much grander scale. In those ancient and widely-extended marshes, just as in the great Dismal Swamp of Virginia at the present day, vegetation flourished and decayed until a deposit of carbonaceous matter sufficient to form a coal bed had accumulated, when the land subsided beneath the waters and strata of sand and clay were deposited; for all sandstones were once beds of soft, incoherent sand, and shales were soft mud or clay at the bottom of the sea. This process was continued during a long period of time, until all the veins of coal had been pro- duced. The coal beds mark the eras when the surface remained stationary, while the sandstones point to times of subsidence. Such movements seem to have been common in those early ages, when the earth's crust was much thinner than now; for it is a well-established fact that our earth was once a vaporous mass, "with- out form and void "; that afterward it condensed to a burning, fiery mass, over which, in the cooling process of time, a thin crust had formed which gradually thick- ened until the warmth no longer radiated from the still heated and molten interior. With a thinner crust -warmed through and through from beneath-grew, as in a great hot-bed, many curious and tropical plants, even far to the northward, in lands now locked in eternal ice. As in imagination we picture the landscape when God said, " Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed," we feel like Gulliver in Swift's wondrous tale, who lost himself in an immense cornfield, where the corn grew up tall as trees; only our forest is composed not of corn but of gigantic ferns and palms. We are surrounded with tall calamites and sombre sigillaria; but God has not yet planted a beautiful flower, or sent forth a warbling songster. No quadruped comes forth by day or night to seek its prey; only swarms of insects darken the air. The stillness of death reigns in this old forest so wide and deep, and we seem to see-to use the language of peerless Hugh Miller-"in the multitude of trunks darkened above by clouds of foliage, the slim col umns of an elder Alhambra." But those graceful col- umns, the sigillaria and the lepidodendron, have been ex- tinct for unnumbered centuries. We may tunnel into the mountain where their blackened trunks are sleeping the dead and stony sleep of ages ; but, as in the tumuli of the mound-builders which dot the prairies of the west, no spirit comes forth to tell us of their history. Yet he is blind who cannot see in the adaptation of means to a preconceived end the evidence of design. It was design that produced them; it was design that pre- served them; and the vast stores of fuel which they have contributed to make in this western world compel us to believe that the Designer has intended glorious things for ultimate America. For while there are 518 square miles of coal lands in Belgium, 2,000 in France, 4,000 in Spain, and 12,000 in Great Britain and Ireland, the num- ber of square miles in North America cannot be less than 150,000. The contrast is not only striking but pro- foundly interesting, as shadowing forth a glorious future for the western hemisphere. We delight to think that here shall be reached a higher civilization than the world has yet seen; that here a republic is already established which shall be a terror to tyrants, and the glory of which shall last a thousand years. Our heart exults over the of that door which opens on the long vista of years. destiny in store for America, "the gem of the ocean,"
with her broad and fertile acres which shall feed her un- born millions, and containing as she does the stored-up fuel of the world, mountains of iron and richest mines of gold and silver. We live in the glimmering dawn of the day that is to be; yet looking down the vista of time we catch a glimpse of its noonday glory, when America's ships shall whiten every sea, when her cities shall be vast hives, when her farms shall be gardens, when her poets and philosophers shall flourish, and when her fame shall be greater than that of Greece or Rome. Oh, that her foundations may be laid in righteousness, that the great- est kingdom of earth may become the kingdom of that Stone which was cut out of the mountain without hands!
We can only speak briefly of the different soils over- spreading the county, and which usually conceal the rock formations we have described. These are mainly derived in one way or another from the destruction and decomposition of the underlying strata. Sand was once sandstone and clay was once shale. An active agent in producing and distributing the soil has been ice, called by Agassiz God's great plow. It seems clear that ice in the form of glaciers once moved across the county in a direction from northeast to southwest, corresponding very nearly with the direction of the mountain chains. We know the direction they took from the striæe or groov- ings left in places on the surface of the harder rocks, and produced by stones frozen in the bottom of the glacier. Fine examples of polished and striated surfaces have been observed on the head of Lamb's Creek; also near Cherry Flats; near Ogdensburg, and farther east; and again south of east from Veilstown; while the coal conglomerate on the very top of the mountain east of the river, in Tioga township, is polished smooth as glass. Near the last locality is a boulder of Red Catskill sand- stone, about twelve feet in diameter, which has come from a stratum near the foot of the mountain, several hundred feet below. Some of the stones which have been instrumental in planing and furrowing the under- lying strata were brought by these glaciers from great distances; as for example, boulders of granite, syenite, etc., from the region of the St. Lawrence River, and limestone from central New York. These travelers are usually small, and often have their surfaces scratched or polished. They are not so abundant as in some parts of the country, but are mingled with sand, gravel, clay and great quantities of water-worn stones derived from the immediate neighborhood, in which all our formations are represented. With such material as this all our val- leys were filled during the cold period, in some cases to a depth of perhaps one hundred feet; while curious hil- locks were formed here and there, which are hard to be accounted for; and of which the "hog-back " in the marsh above Niles Valley is an example. Also, the knolls above Hammond's on Crooked Creek, and again at and above the cemetery west of Tioga; the ridge above Nelson, where the river makes a curious ox bow bend; the hillocks south of the Lawrenceville depot, and especially the knoll on William S. Smith's farm a little farther south, and another on the opposite side of the river, and one at Mitchell's Creek. The terraces bordering the river plain along the Tioga and Cowan- esque show to what extent the valleys were filled, and the depth of the channels now existing between them shows the amount of material which the rivers have removed while reopening their ancient channels. But they are not yet down to the old levels at which they ran before the filling took place. So that the Drift Period, one of the latest in geological history, no doubt represents a hoar antiquity, though only at the threshold
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