USA > Pennsylvania > Lackawanna County > The Wyoming Valley, upper waters of the Susquehanna, and the Lackawanna coal-region : including views of the natural scenery of northern Pennsylvania : from the Indian occupancy to the year 1875 > Part 13
USA > Pennsylvania > Susquehanna County > Susquehanna > The Wyoming Valley, upper waters of the Susquehanna, and the Lackawanna coal-region : including views of the natural scenery of northern Pennsylvania : from the Indian occupancy to the year 1875 > Part 13
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37
was set down in round numbers at $1,850,000,- 000. Add the cost of the roads completed in 1869, at an average of forty thousand dollars per milc, and we have a total cost of $2,070,000,000, an amount nearly cqual to the national debt. The aggregate tonnage of these roads in 1868 was about seventy-five million tons, valued at $10,472,250,000. This is equal to about six times their cost, and would pay four such na- tional debts as the country now owes.
"Commissioner Wells, in his recent report, observes : 'If it is assumed that a line of railway gives access to fifteen square miles of country on each side of it, or thirty square miles altogether, then the thirteen thousand miles of railway which it is estimated have been constructed dur- ing the five years from 1865 to 1870 will have opened up three hundred and ninety thousand miles of what, for the purpose of general produc- tion, may be considered new territory-a tract of country larger than the whole area of France, and nearly three and a half times larger than the whole area of Great Britain.'
"Not only in the item of mileage, but also in construction and accommodation, has there been a great progress in our railroad system. Much better roads are being built than were formerly deemed necessary. Steel rails are taking the place of iron rails. The roads are much better equipped than formerly ; more safe-guards are provided against accident, and fewer accidents occur in proportion to the amount of travel. Railway capitalists have discovered the folly and poor economy of hasty and imperfect construc- tion, which, though cheaper at first, is more costly in the end. The multiplication of roads and their healthy competition with cach other, have had a tendency to reduce their rates of fare and freight charges, and in this way serve the interest of community. Indeed, all the facts and . statistics of the great railway interests of the country greet the new year with exceedingly inviting prospects for the future. The progress of the past, wonderful as it seems, will be entire- ly eclipsed by that of the next forty years."
CHAPTER XVIII.
COAL-ITS ORIGIN AND FORMATION.
- "I will not urge a revelation, mercies, miracles, and martyrs, But, after twice a thousand years, go, learn
thou of the pagan : It were happier and wiser even among fools, to cling to the shadow of a hope, Than, in the company of sages, to win the substance of despair."-Tupper.
"No mountain can
Measure with a perfect man, For it is on temples writ, Adamant is soft to wit."-Emerson.
"Coal," says Prof. J. S. Newberry, "is entitled to be considered as the mainspring of our civili- zation. By the power developed in its combus- tion all the wheels of industry are kept in mo- tion, commerce is carried with rapidity and eer- tainty over all portions of the earth's surface, the useful metals are brought from the deep caves in which they have hidden themselves, and are purified and wrought to serve the purposes of man. By coal night is, in one sense, converted . into day, winter into summer, and the life of man, measured by its fruits, greatly prolonged. Wealth, with all the luxuries, and the triumphs it brings, is its gift. Though black, sooty, and ' often repulsive in its aspects, it is the embodi- ment of a power more potent than that attribut- ed to the genii in Oriental tales. Its possession is, therefore, the highest material boon that can be eraved by a community or nature.
"Coal is also not without its poetry. It has been formed under the stimulus of the sunshine of long-past ages, and the light and power it liolds are nothing else thian such sunshine stored in this black casket to wait the coming and serve the purposes of man. In the process of its form- ation it composed the tissues of those strange trees that lifted their sealed trunks and waved their feathery foliage over the marshy shores of the carboniferous continent where not only no man was, but gigantic salamanders and mail-elad
fishes were the monarelis of the animated world."
It is so seldom that the black diamond suggests sentiment, or that romantic thoughts are engen- dered by proximity to the sooty covers of the coal region, that it may be ventured to advance a truly inspiring idea which has been uprooted from the tedious mazes of philosophy, viz : that the earth in giving up its coal, literally breathes : or, in other words, coal is but a consolidated form of the sunshine of a long-past day ; a por- tion of the generously extended solar force of one age, fixed in material shape, and by simple yet wondrous process sealed up from all disper- sion and loss, and transmitted to another age long after to assist to fulfil in it the development of a state of life incomparably higher than that in which it originated.
As a writer of ability has expressed it :- "It is no mere sport of fancy, then, but an utterance of' science to say, that all the while we are imbibing the warmth of our coal-fire, we are actually bask- ing in the sun's rays which vivified the vegetation out of which the coal was produced countless ages ago."
How much of the primeval supply of carbon in the air was thus ultimately solidified as coal, by vital organic action, during the carboniferous ages, must in our present defective knowledge of the whole mass of coaly substance in the earthi, be a matter rather of conjecture than of computation.
S2
THE WYOMING VALLEY.
It is supposed by writers of acknowledged authority, however, that the atmosphere at the beginning of the carboniferous period on the great day of plant-life was many times rieher in carbon than it was at the close of it. An esti- mate carefully made from the best data of the sums-total of coal within the principal coal fields of the world, indicates that the aggregate of carbon buried under the soil cannot be less than some six times the quantity still resident in the air. If it is assumed to have approached at all to this proportion, who needs to longer wonder at the colossal dimensions of the ancient coal- plants, and their exuberant growth ?
But, anterior to this remarkable cra, the reader will take in at a glance, the primitive causes from which the present coal deposit is the result.
-
Once America was a long, narrow island, reaching from Nova Scotia to the far West ; neither Alleghanics nor Rocky mountains as yet existed, but a great ocean spread away to the north and another to the south. Gradually on either side, by tlic action of the waters, vast de- posits of stratified rock were formed, which accu- mulating, were at length raised to the surface at numerous points, forming low, marshy islands. Thesc became covered with a luxuriant vegetation under the healthy growth before referred to; generations of this rapid growth quickly succeed- ed each other, the decay of each forming the basis of that which followed. For ages this process went on, and when the Alleghanies were afterwards upheaved in successive ranges to the southward, the reader can easily imagine the great disturbance, the distortions and dislocations which these stratified deposits must have under- gone. Let it be remembered too, that these up- heavals must have imprisoned many a large, inlying body of water, which, in proportion to the resistance offered, would the more violently force various outlets to the sea beyond, and in its way out, would, with its tumultuous current, tear up the already loosened strata-if possible, sweeping them entirely away, but otherwise Icaving them behind in confused heaps.
.
The ranges of the Allegbanies increase in height as we proceed southward, till in North Carolina they rise more than six thousand fect
above the level of the sea. The more southern ranges, being later in their upheaval, and there- fore meeting with greater resistance from the continually hardening crust of the earth, were for this reason thrown up to a greater height, power in all cases being measured by resistance. These ranges, therefore, offered a proportionally greater resistance to the escape of the waters which they enclosed ; hence the greater violence of the escaping waters, which accounts for the fact, that for the most part, the coal measures of the south have been swept away.
In regions where there was no violent action of water at all, as in Western Pennsylvania, we have the soft, bituminous coal, the hydrogen of which has never been permitted to escape ; and the reason why the coal in Eastern Pennsylvania is not bituminous as a general thing is this :- The external disturbance which affected the strata, though insufficient to swecp them away, yet so effectually exposed them to the air that the soft eoal became in time hardened to anthra- cite.
This classification, which recognizes but two chief sorts-common bituminous coal and the non-bituminous or anthracite, is the one most correctly used, but a nicer subdivision for scien- tific purposes, is founded on the relative abun- dance of the uncombined carbon or coke, and the volatile or distillable and inflamable bituminous matter so called. These in the phrascology of chemistry, arc known as the hydrocarbons-a group of substances in liquid and gaseous condi- tions, according to the temperatures they exist under, and arc all constituted of hydrogen and carbon united in definite proportions. A coal destitute altogether of the hydrocarbons is a true anthracite ; if it contain some ten or twelve per cent. of those volatile compounds, and burns with a soon-exhausted flame, it should be called a semi-anthracite ; if it have as much of them as twenty or twenty-five per cent. it is best termed a semi-bituminous coal ; and in all cases where it possesses as much as or more than thirty per cent. it claims thic title of a true bituminous coal.
All these four classes may be divided into sub- varieties founded, not on the amount, but rather on the specific nature of their hydrocarbons or
1
88
COAL-ITS ORIGIN AND FORMATION.
flame-making elements, and partially on the tex- ture or physical structure of the coal as a rock. Such, for instance, is the distinction between the cannel and ordinary coals. There is a general law in the geographical relations of the above- named four classes of coals, noticeable in crossing many of the larger coal-fields, especially those of the United States between the Alleghany moun- tains and the Missouri River, but with scientific principles as such, we refer the reader to more elaborate works.
A theory which at one time was stringently adhered to, but which is now exploded, seems to retain many believers yet, among the miners, and many people in the coal regions, viz :- that coal was formed by the drifting of large masses of timber and early vegetation into water enclosures or bays, and there allowed by chemical action and time to force itself into coal.
There can be no doubt that coal is the produc- tion of vegetation, and that too of an immense quantity of it, but the exploded theory above re- ferred to loses its force in the fact, that by drift- ing masses, the material could not have been furnished in sufficient quantity, and disposed in layers of equal thickness, extending for many miles, and so free from mud, sand, or other im- purities or foreign substances.
Mr. Macfarlane, of Towanda, author of "Coal Regions of America," states that "coal of the carboniferous age, when examined, is apparently never found to be formed of the trunks and large branches of trees. Slate rocks are so formed, and it is on account of the size of the trees and plants, that they have been converted into slate or shale instead of coal, from the introduction among them of sand, clay, and mud. The too great preponderance of earthy matter renders them unfit for fuel, although containing some portion of carbon."
The same author referred to gives in Appendix I. the following :
"The opinion now held by geologists, is, that the vegetation from which coal of the Carbonif- erous age originated was similar to that of the peat bogs now found in nearly all parts of the world. The examination of coal docs not afford evidence of its having been produced from the
flattened trunks or more solid parts of trees, but it abounds in fragments of the leaves, and occa- sionally extremities of branches and fonds, or leaves of the kind which retain the stalk when they fall off. In Anthracite coal the process of liquefaction and carbonization, or perhaps it should be called crystallization, has obliterated nearly all traces of the original vegetable matter; but, as we go farther westward, we find some kinds of bituminous coal which appear to be composed of minute leaves and fibres matted to- gether. Large trunks or branches are not found, but their layers resembling mineralized charcoal are found between the layers of coal when sepa- rated, and the material appears to have been of' that soft description which must have flourished either in water or where the land was little ele- vated above the water, and when the climate was moist and warm. Certainly the vegetable matter must have been immediately covered with water as soon as it was formed, in order to be preserved from the rapid decomposition which always takes place in the open air. Sea-weeds and other ma- rine plants are not found in coal, but the plants are all of the fresh water species, and it lias been confidently asserted by Mr. Lesquereux that there is no coal with marks of marine origin; and further, that there is no true peat formed entire- ly of sea-weed and marine plants, although the sandstone and limestone layers between the seams of coal often contain marine fossils.
"The supposition that coal is a true mineral, formed only by chemical agency, and without an accumulation of vegetation grown on the surface, and buried afterward, is an hypothesis to which Nature does not give the slightest support. The analogy of formation between the peat-bogs, of our times and the beds of coal of the coal- measures cannot be called a theory, it is a de- monstrable fact. We can now see the coal growing up by the heaping of woody matter in the bogs. After awhile we see it trausformed into a dark, combustible compound that we name peat or lignite, according to its age.
Prof. Lesquereux, whose writings are con- ceded in nearly all the State Geological Reports, to be about exhaustive, says :
"The formation of the coal is now pretty well
84
THE WYOMING VALLEY.
1
understood among geologists. It results from active growth of woody plants; whose debris, falling every year, are preserved against decon- position by stagnant water, or great atmospheric humidity. It is the process which now still forms our deposits of peat. It demands for its favorable action a ground or basin, rendered im- permiable by a substratum of clay, a peculiar kind of plants, constantly growing at the same place, and heaping their debris for a length of time. At our epoch the formation of peat is essentially of two kinds. Either the vegetables which furnish the materials are aquatic, or semi- aerial plants, having their roots in water, and expanding their branches, leaves, etc., on the surface of the water, or above it. Their débris fall in water, and are hcaped and preserved under it. In another way, and this is most generally the case, the plants of the peat-bogs are of a peculiar texturc. Hygrometrical, like sponges, they absorb humidity by their aerial tissues as much as by their roots, and, thus protceted themselves against decomposition from atmos- pherie action, they cover in their growth every kind of woody debris, even large trees, and afford to then the same protective influence. In that way the surface of peat-bogs of this kind grows constantly up. In that way also peat-bogs grow at our time upon the slopes of steep mountains, whenever atmospheric humidity is constant and abundant enough to furnish moisture for the life of those hygrometrieal plants which now are mere mosses. The peat-bogs of the coal did grow in the same way ; the distinction in cannel- èoal, which has been found under water, and bituminous eoal, which, by its layers, indicates an upper aquatic growth, is well marked. But, during the Carboniferous epoeli, the circum- stanees favorable to the growth of the peat were in their highest development. Low, wide basins of stagnant water, whose bottom was first coated by deposits of elay ; an atmosphere constantly charged with vapors, and a large proportion of earbonic acid, the food of plants, forming by its transformation the woody tissues ; floating vege- tables of immense size, first growing horizontally at the surface of the water, and filling the basin with their debris, then forming a support for a
more aerial vegetation ; fern-trecs, lycopodes, horse-tails, all of enormous size, heaped in a cou- tinuous growth the woody tissues of their vege- table remains in a now inconceivable proportion. Our thickest beds of peat now measure searcely 20 feet. By compression and mineralization the thickness would be reduced to one-sixth, or three feet at the most. We have beds of coal of 20 feet of thickness which would make a deposit of peat reach 120 feet.
"It is true, indeed, that the peat- bogs of old did rot extend over the whole surface ; that they were of various dimensions, separated by sandy hills or by deep lagoons ; that after the deposit of their materials, erosions caused by water on other agency have greatly diminished their size. But it is true also that beds of coal, like the Pittsburg bed, whose average thickness is about eight feet, may be traced over surfaces more than 100 miles in width.
"It is equally true that beds of coal are super- posed at intervals, in the coal-measures, that at the same place a boring of a few hundred feet may pass through five beds of coal, or even more of various thicknesses. So immense, indeed, arc the riches of the American coal-measures, that in their conception of the future derlopement of the human race, geographers, historians, phi- losophers, agree in this idea, that in the United States we have, especially in our coal-deposits, the clements for the greatest and most perfect development of the human race."
The process of formation is from this point taken up by Mr. Macfarlane in his able work be- fore referred to, as follows :
"The pressure required to transform the vege- table material into coal was applied by the for- mation of the superineumbent strata of rock, by means of the sinking of portions of the land and the elevation of other portions. Prof. Rogers, of the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, seems to attribute these to those mighty movements of the earth's surface called earthquakes, but they are now commonly accounted for by more grad- ual movements. The present great elevation of the mountains had not taken place, the surface of the earth was not much above the ocean, and sınall changes of level were sufficient to sub-
COAL -- ITS ORIGIN AND FORMATION.
merge the continents which were sometimes above and sometimes below the water.
"The great strata of sand-rock upon the slate, and sometimes directly upon the coal, were caused by more impetuous inundations of the ocean in all its might and majesty, washing away vast quantities of the soil and rocky strata of the ancient continent; breaking the rocks into small fragments, carrying them to a great distance inland, and wearing them into water- . worn pebbles. These rivers or oceans of sand gravel, or clay, thus deposited, in course of time became hardened into rocks, and their pressure upon the moist and rank vegetation of the coal- bogs buried bencath them has thus by a simple aud natural process, formed the strata of slate, pure coal, and sandstone. Being very compactly matted together, it formed a strong spongy mass, not easily separated by a current of water flow- ing over it, or not pervious, or liable to be pene- trated by foreign substances borne by such cur- rent.
* * * * *
"The combinations formed by the usual affini- ties of the constituents of coal seem to show that all coal was first formed of the bituminous vari- ety, and that anthracite is the result of igneous action to which it was subjected after it became coal. Anthracite is only found in metamorphic rocks, and all coal found in metamorphic rocks is anthracite."
The same author, in enlarging upon the "Rep- etition of the Seams of Coal" states that "in Illinois and other Western states, there is prob- ably not one of the principal seams of coal that has not, at some locality, a bed of limestone more or less pure associated with it, containing the fossilized remains of marine animals in such a perfect condition as to leave no doubt that they lived on the spot where they are found. These fossiliferous strata occur between the different beds of coal, so as to show that if the coal was formed in fresli-water marshes, as the character of its vegetable fossils proves, near the sea-level, as is generally supposed, there must have been a subsidence and elevation for every seam of coal, as the intervening marine beds attest the pres- ence of the sun where they were formed, as is
also proved by the fossils of sea shells, corals, and teeth and spines of cartilagenous fishes.
"The formation of other seams of coal above the first is therefore to be accounted for by the new formed strata filling up the water to the surface, the growth upon it of a second erop of peat bog material, a second submerging, and a repetition of the original process throughout.
"The thickness of a scam of coal depends on the length of time the vegetable materials of which it was composed were accumulating. Seams of coal are sometimes split, as it were, by a wedge-like field of slate, which has been caused by an inundation of carboniferous mud flowing over a part only of the peat-bog region in its half finished state, the subsequent growth of the remainder of the formation on the mud, and the thickening of the part not thus inun- dated. In the Mahony anthracite coal region is a great bed of coal called the Mammoth, but, when we go west to Mount Carmel, we are told that it is split in this manner into two separate coal beds, and so is the Baltimore bed at Wilkes- Barre divided between that place and Pittston. The fragmentary character of the coal fields is evidently caused by convulsions which took place long subsequent to the formation of the whole of the coal measures, and we now possess, or at least have only discovered some of the broken parts of a vastly greater field, which once existed on this continent. Deep valleys have been forined cutting down through the coal regions, leaving sometimes only small patches of coal on the tops of the highest mountains, and extensive countries often lie between, where thousands of feet in thickness of the upper for- mation, including the coal, have been removed by some mighty agency exposing the Devonian and Silurian rocks on the surface. In imagina- tion we can restore the gigantie arches which onee carried the same coal beds high through the air from one mountain aeross to another many miles apart, and which are now destroyed and buried up, constituting new sand, gravel, and rock deposits in the Atlantic.
"The direction from which these ocean cur- rents procceded is sometimes very evident. There are certain rocks peculiar to the coal re-
1
86
THE WYOMING VALLEY.
gions called conglomerates, the largest of which is the base of the coal, and they are evidently formed of the fragments of the older formations, the sand and pebbles of which they are made being water-worn, rounded and cemented to- gether br smaller pebbles and sand. The bot- tom of the stratum in any given place is always composed of larger pebbles than the upper por- tion, showing very plainly the manner in which it was formed by material carried in water, the heaviest portion sinking first. Furthermore, these conglomerate rocks are much thicker and the pebbles larger in the eastern or southeastern part of the Alleghany coal region, than they are farther west, showing that the current was spend- ing its force in that direction. In the Lehigh and Schuylkill regions the pebbles are larger than hens' eggs, and the formation itself is as much as 1,400 feet thick. Farther north, at Towanda, it is much less than 100 feet, the coarser part only 10 or 15 feet, and the pebbles are no larger than a pea. As you go farther westward, the pebbles diminish to the size of a mustard seed, and the stratum of rock thins out until it disappears altogether. This shows very evidently the source from which the rocks of the coal measures were derived, and that the ocean currents which carried them proceeded from a southeast to a northwest direction.
"In Michigan the thinning out of the strata toward the south, indicates the source of the
rock making materials to have been in the north.
In Illinois the conglomerate rock is thickest and coarsest, in the southwestern part of the field, thinning out and the material becoming fine along the Indiana edge of that field. Far- ther southwest, in Western Central Arkansas, the conglomerate has a vastly greater develop- ment, showing its proximity to strong currents and to the land of the ancient continent from which this rock was formed. There is also a great development of the conglomerates beneath the coal in Tennessee and Alabama, of which the celebrated Lookout Mountain is a conspicuous example.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.