USA > Texas > Tarrant County > History of Texas, together with a biographical history of Tarrant and Parker counties; containing a concise history of the state, with portraits and biographies of prominent citizens of the above named counties, and personal histories of many of the early settlers and leading families > Part 22
USA > Texas > Parker County > History of Texas, together with a biographical history of Tarrant and Parker counties; containing a concise history of the state, with portraits and biographies of prominent citizens of the above named counties, and personal histories of many of the early settlers and leading families > Part 22
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In the timber-belt beds there are other clays and sands well suited to the manufac- ture of earthenware and glass. Most of the beds of pottery elays of this division ex- amined so far in eastern Texas are, however, only suited for the coarser grades of earthen -
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ware, but in Grimes and Robertson counties (and possibly in others as well) clays of higher grade are found.
Kaolin .- In Robertson county, not far from the town of Mexia, there is a deposit of sandy clay which is readily separated by washing into a kaolin of excellent quality and a perfectly pure quartz sand. This kaolin has been tested practically and pro- duces a good porcelain.
Potteries have been erected in various parts of the State within the limits of the Fayette and timber-belt beds for the manu- facture of common earthenware, flower pots, etc., and several are now in successful opera- tion. Among localities of potteries may be mentioned Lavernia, Wilson county; Athens, Henderson county; Kosse, Limestone county; Burton, Washington county, and others.
In addition to the kaolin already men- tioned in Robertson county, kaolins of excel- lent quality are found in Edwards and Uvalde counties. These are pure white in color, somewhat greasy to the touch, and are infusible in the hottest blow-pipe flame. Being practically free from iron, they are adapted to the making of the best grades of china. They are free from grit and every other objectionable impurity. A com- parison of the analyses of these kaolins with those of established reputation more fully show their value.
Of the other materials needed in the manu- facture of pottery, we have deposits of feld- spar well suited for glazing; gypsum for the manufacture of plaster of paris for molds; clays suitable for the saggers, and cheap fuel in abundance.
BUILDING MATERIALS.
The variety and widespread ocenrrence of the rocks of Texas suitable for construction
is so great that it will be impracticable to allude to them in any other than general terms. They will therefore be grouped under general headings.
Granites occur in widely separated por- tions of the State. The first locality is w !: at has been termed in the reports the central mineral region, the second is in the extreme west, or trans-Pecos Texas. The granites of the first or central region are of different colors. The best known is the red granite, such as was used in the construction of the capitol building. The color is red to dark reddish-gray, varying from fine to rather coarse grain in structure, and susceptible of high polish. The outcrop of the granite, which can be quarried to any desired dimen- sions, covers an area of over 100 square miles.
There is a quarry now in operation on the portion from which the granite was taken for the building of the capitol, on account of which it was originally opened, the material used having been donated by the owners, Colonel Norton, Dr. Westfall and George W. Lacy.
Besides this particular granite there are many others in this region which will prove as useful. In the northern part of Gillespie county there is a brownish granite of very grain which takes a beautiful polish; and in addition there are found in various portions of the region granites varying in color from light to dark gray, which are well adapted for building purposes, and in some instances will prove of decided value for ornamental and monumental purposes.
The granites of trans-Pecos Texas, like those of the central mineral region, are well suited both for building and ornamental pur- pores. The western granites, however, lack the variety of color which is found in those
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of the central region, being for the most part a lighter or darker gray, the feldspar being very light-colored in all of them. They are adjacent to railway transportation, however, as the Southern Pacific Railway passes very near their outerop in the Quitman mountains and directly by them in the Franklin mount- ains, near El Paso, and will sooner or later come into market.
Porphyries .- Among the most beautiful and indestructible of our building stones we must place the porphyries. Their hardness, however, and the difficulty of quarrying and dressing them, often prevent their taking the place in actual use that their good qualities would otherwise secure for them; but where the elements of durability and beauty are sought their worth must be properly recog- nized.
Porphyries of almost every shade and color abond in trans-Pecos Texas. There are in the State museum specimens taken from the onterops in the Quitman Mountains alone, which are readily divisible into twenty or more shades. These vary through light grays, yellows, reds, purples and greens to black, and their polished surfaces are espe- cially rich. The quantity and accessibility to railroad transportation must prove suffi- ciont inducement for their development.
Marbles .- The deposits of the marbles, like those of the granites, are found both in the central mineral region and in trans- Pecos Texas. In addition to these deposits there ocenr in numerous places limestones more or less altered from various causes which are locally called marbles, and are sometimes both beautiful and useful when properly dre-sed. Among such deposits may be noticed what is known as the Austin marble, a stratmin of the Cretaceous which has been altered until its fossils have been changed to
calcite. The body of the stone is, when pol- ished, of a light yellow color, and the trac- ings of the contained shells in pure calcite, which gives a very pretty effect, although their fragile character detracts greatly from the usefulness of the stone. Other deposits of similar semi-marbles of various colors are found among the Carboniferous limestones of the northern portion of the State The marbles and semi-marbles of the central mineral region are the altered limestones of the Silurian and older beds, some of which are of fine texture and capable of receiving an excellent polish. The marbles of the Silurian beds found in San Saba, Burnet, Gillespie and other counties, which are known as " Burnet marbles," are both of solid color and variegated. They are found in beautiful pink, white, buff, blue and gray shades, and although not true marbles, are well adapted for many uses.
The marbles belonging to what are called the Texan beds, a formation older than the Silurian, are, however, real marbles. They are found near Packsaddle mountain, En- chanted Peak, and in the Comanche creek region of Mason county. They are often snowy white in color, of even grain, and among the deposits are found strata of me- dimm thickness. They are not, however, as extensive as the deposits of the semi-marbles.
In trans-Pecos Texas marbles belonging, as is supposed, to the same geologic age, exist in great abundance, and for beauty in color can not be surpassed.
From the Carrizos to the Quitman mount- ains outerops occur in the vicinity of the railroad of marbles which are certain at no distant day to become the basis for great commercial industry. They are found banded or striped and clouded, as well as pure white. They are fine grained, and can be quarried
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in stone of almost any dimensions. Some of them when polished will rival the Aragon- ite or Mexican or yx in delicacy of coloring.
The limestones of Texas which are suited for building purposes are abundant and widespread in their occurrence. The Cre- taceous formation which covers fully one- fourth of the entire area of the State abounds in limestone well adapted for structural pur- poses. In addition to this we have the lime- stones of the Carboniferous, Permian and Silurian systems, so that the total area is largely increased.
The limestones of the Cretaceous occur both in its upper and lower divisions. In the Austin chalk there are beds which fur- nish excellent stone which is quarried for use in many places, but a large portion of it is too chalky and not firm enough for gen- eral use. The best limestone of this forma- tion is that contained in the Fredericksburg and Washita divisions of the Lower Cre- taceous. These limestones are of color vary- ing from white to yellow, very rarely darker, and are often somewhat soft when first quar- ried, becoming harder on exposure.
Among the materials of the Clear Fork division of the Permian formation are some even-bedded limestones of square fracture, fine, even grain and good color, that will prove valuable as building material. These were observed in the northwestern part of Shackelford county, and will also be found north and south of that locality along the outerop of these beds. Seymour and Bal- linger show buildings constructed of these linestones.
Sandstones and Quartzites .- The sand- stones are fully as widely distributed as the limestones, being found in nearly all dis- tricts in greater or less quantity. In the Fayette sands are found beds of indurated
sands of light color which have been used in various localities along their line of outerop for building purposes. Rock has been quar- ried from these deposits for many localities, principally at Rockland, Tyler county; Quarry Station, on the Gulf, Colorado & Santa Fe Railroad; Rock Quarry, on the. Honston & Texas Central Railway, in Wash- ington county, and in various parts of Fay- ette, Lavaca and other counties to the south- west.
In the timber-belt beds the altered (and even the unaltered) greensand marls are sometimes so indurated as to be used for building purposes. In addition to this many of the hill-cappings of sandstone, which at times replace the iron ore, are valu- able building stones.
In the Cretaceous area north of the Colo- rado river there are no sandstones of any particular valne so far as our examinations liave extended.
The area of the central coal field abounds in excellent sandstone for building purposes, some of which has been extensively quarried and used in the construction of buildings from Dallas west to Cisco. It is of good color, quarries well, and presents a handsome appearance in the wall. It is so generally found in this district that it is impossible to namo the localities.
In the Permian there are some sandstones which will be of wide application in the buildings of the State. East of Pecos City, at Quito, on the Texas & Pacific Railway, a company has recently opened a quarry in a compact, well jointed red sandstone which is probably of Permian age. It is of a beau- tiful red color, uniform in texture and color, easily worked yet durable, and in every way adapted to the best nses in building. The company in boring a well at the place
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have passed through more than 100 feet of this red sandstone, thus proving its nulim- ited quantity. It will compare favorably in every way with the sandstones formerly im- ported into the State for the fronts and trimmings of buildings.
Beyond the Carrizo and Diabolo mountains there is a fine-grained red sandstone which is destined to be one of the finest building stones of the State. It is a little darker in color than the Quito stone, finer-grained, firmer, of even texture, and will lend itself to almost any character of decoration.
In this trans-Pecos region there are many other sandstones and quartzites which will in time come into use for structural purposes.
Slate .- The two areas in which the older rocks are found both give promise of fur- nishing slate suitable for roofing. In the central mineral district several locallties have been examined which on the surface give in- dication of furnishing good roofing slate, and in the vicinity of the Carrizo mountains, El Paso county, similar indications are found.
It will of course require some actual work in opening the quarry sufficiently to ascer- tain the condition of the material below the surface to fully decide the value of the de- posits, but the indications are very favorable and warrant such an attempt at development.
Thus it is readily apparent that in build- ing stone there is no lack of variety, as well as an ample supply of all that can be made useful.
Clays suitable for brickmaking, terra cotta and drain tile are found in all the different formations occurring in the State. All are not of equal value, and indeed the brick made from some few are quite inferior, but the majority produce good, serviceable brick. The colors of the brick vary from yellow or cream color, such as are made at Austin,
through various shades of browns and reds, according to the character of the clay. In eastern Texas, as well as in the carboniferous arca, the brick are usually mottled from the amount of iron in the clays. Selected clays, however, in these localities produce brick of excellent color. The importance of this in- dustry will be seen by the following state- ment of the aggregate of brick production for the year 1889, which was received from the operators of the brick kilns in answer to inquiries, namely, 95,000,000.
Many of the clays of the Tertiary ex- amined during the past year are well suited to the manufacture of terra cotta and drain tile. These are found in the region covered by the timber-belt beds, as well as among the Fayette clays. Those of the other areas have not yet been examined fully enough to determine their availability for these pur- poses, but it is probable that many carbon- iferons clays will prove well adapted for them.
Lithographic stone is found in several places in Texas, but it is too much fractmed for use.
Lime .- As is well known, the lime male from the rocks of that horizon of the Cretace- ous formation known as the Caprina lime. stones (which is the most persistent bed of all the formation) is unsurpa sed for quality. The fame of the Anstin lime is well estab- lished. Other beds of the cretaceous will answer well in lime-making, although some of them contain too much clayey matter, or are otherwise unfitted for this use. Lime is also made from the limestone of the other deposits, but none of these have been so suc- cessfully operated as those above mentioned. The reports received for 1889 gave a total production of 190,000 barrels.
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Cement Materials .- Cements are of two kinds,-natural, or hydraulic, and artificial, or Portland.
Natural, or hydraulic, cement is made from certain clayey limestones, which, when burned and ground, have the property of setting or becoming hard under water. Portland cem- ents are of similar character, but are made by artificially mixing the limestone and clays in the proper proportion.
Materials for both characters of cement exist in abundance within the State. The limestones of certain beds of the Cretaceous are clayey enough to make cement when properly calcined and ground, and the same properties are claimed for some of those found in the Tertiary, but our tests have so far failed to bear out the claim. Some of the limestones belonging to the Clear Fork beds of the Permian might answer if the percent- age of magnesia was not too great.
The materials for Portland cement are, however, more abundant, and the product of so much better quality as to render the natural cement a matter of comparatively small importance. The Austin chalk is rather widespread in its distribution and adjacent to clays of almost any required grade.
The entire practicability of the manufac- ture of Portland cement has been shown by the two factorios which have undertaken it, one at San Antonio, the other at Austin. The former supplied much of the cement used in the erection of the present capitol building, and it was of very excellent quality.
Plaster of Paris is produced from gyp- sum by driving out the percentage of water which is chemically combined with it. Its manufacture on any desired scale is entirely practicable in the Permian region of Texas, where many beds of gypsum of great purity occur.
Sund for mortar, plaster, etc., is found in many places. The Cretaceons is perhaps the area in which it is scarcest, and it can be brought in from either side. The locations will be more fully discussed in the descrip- tions of counties.
METALS AND ORES.
Iron .- Probably the most important of our ore deposits are those of iron, which in various forms are found in many parts of the State.
Beginning at the Louisiana line with a breadth of nearly 150 miles, stretching south- west in a gradually narrowing belt and proba- bly fading out in Caldwell county or just be- yond, there is found a series of hills of greater or less elevation which are capped with ferruginated material, varying from a sandstone with a small amount of oxide of iron in the matrix, to limonite ores of high grade. Of this division only a few of the counties of east Texas have been fully ex- amined, but enough has been done to show the probability that the greater amount of workable ores of this belt lie east of the 96th meridian, although there may be localities west of that line at which ores of value occur. These ores are associated entirely with rocks of the Tertiary and later periods.
In the Cretaceous no iron ores of any con- sequence are known except in the extreme west, where deposits of ochre seem to occur in connection with strata belonging to the Fredericksburg division of the Lower Cretace- ous series.
There are only a few ores of any value found in the carboniferous area, and those of the Permian are not of much importance. The central mineral region, however, con- tains, in connection with its deposits of older
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rocks, largo deposits of very valuable ores, including magnetite, red hematite, aud vari- ons hydrated ores. Finally, in trans-Pecos Texas iron ores of the hematite and magnetic types are found in veins of considerable thickness.
Thus it will be seen that the distribution of the ore; is general, extending entirely across the State from east to west.
The ores of east Texas all belong to the class of limonites, or brown hematites. They have been divided according to their physical structure, due to the manner of their forma- tion, into four general classes,-laminated ores, geode or nodular ores, conglomerate ores, and carbonate ores.
The laminated ores are brown to black in color and vary in structure from a massive to a highly laminated variety in which the lamina vary from one-sixteenth to one-quarter of an inch in thickness, frequently separated by hollow spaces, and sometimes containing thin seams of gray clay. The average thick- ness of the ore bed is from one to three feet, although it may exceed this in places. This class of ores is most extensively developed sonth of the Sabine river. The ore bed is generally underlaid by a stratmin of greeu- sand marl from ten to thirty feet in thick- ness, and overlaid by from one to sixty feet of sands and sandstones.
The nodular, or geode ores, which are best developed north of the Sabine river, usually occur as nodules or geodes, or as sandy- clay strata. This ore generally occurs in nodules or geodes, or as honey-combed, botryoidal, stalactitic and mammillary masses. It is rusty brown, yellow, dull red, or even black color, and has a glossy, dull, or earthy lustre. The most characteristic feature of the ore is the nodular or geode form in which it occurs. Some of the beds are made up of
these masses, either loose in a sandy-clay matrix or solidified in a bed by a ferruginous cement. The ore lies horizontally at or near the tops of the hills, in the same manner as the brown laminated ores to the south of the Sabine river. The beds vary in thickness from less than one foot to over ten feet, the thicker ones being often interbedded with thin seams of sand. The ore-bearing beds are immediately overlaid by sandy or sandy- clayey strata.
Conglomerate ores consist of a conglomer- ate of brown ferruginous pebbles one-quarter to two inches in diameter and cemented in a sandy matrix. Sometimes a few siliceous pebbles are also found. The beds vary from one to twenty feet thick, and are generally local deposits along the banks and bluffs and sometimes in the beds of almost all the creeks and streams in the iron-ore region just de- scribed. Sometimes they cap the lower hills. They are generally of low grade, but could be concentrated by crushing and washing out the sandy matrix. They usually contain more or less ferruginous sandstone in lenticular deposits, and are much cross-bedded.
The investigations of the survey in east Texas show an aggregate iron-bearing area of a thousand square miles. This is not all a solid bed of commercial ore, but the area within which commercial ores are known to exist. If even one-fourth be taken as pro- dnetive iron land, and the bed be estimated at two feet in thickness, both very safe esti- mates, we have a total ontpnt of 1,500,000,000 tons of iron ore. The quality of the ores varies from that adapted to the manufacture of steel, or " Bessemer ores, " to that of low grade.
The ochres of the Cretaceous are found in Uvaldo and Val Verde counties, and proba- bly elsewhere. From analyses they appear to
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be of very high grade, but no examination has yet been made of them by the survey.
A great quantity of hematite ironstone is reported to occur in the beds adjacent to the Waldrip-Cisco division, which, if it equal the sample analyzed, is a very valuable ore.
The iron ores of the central mineral region me of three classes, magnetites, hematites, and hydrous ores, each of which has its own place and mode of occurrence. The magnetites lie in the northwest trend in the Archian rocke, which for practical purposes may be contined between northwest-southeast lines drawn through Lone Grove town upon the east and through Enchanted Rock upon the west. This blocks out a district twenty miles wide, and extending perhaps thirty miles in the direction of the strike. Within this field, however, various structural features have pre- vented, in many places, the outeropping of the irou-bearing system, so that probably two- thirds of the area is not in condition to yield ore without reinoving thick deposits of later origin. Assuming that one-third of the territory, in scattered patches, will show the Fernandan beds at surface or at depths that may be considered workable from an economi- cal standpoint, it must be understood that ouly a small fraction of the thickness of these strata is iron ore. Keeping in mind also the folded condition of the rocks, it is evident that the chances for mining will be depend- ent largely upon the character of the ero- sion, it being premised that the iron bed, if such it be, is not very near the top of the system to which it belongs.
The general section of this system of rocks shows that the magnetite, sometimes asso- ciated with hematite, occurs in a bed usually about fifty feet thick at a definite horizon in it. The investigations of the survey show that
there are several belts within which valuable deposits are known or may be discovered.
The most eastern of these is the Babyhead belt, and the outerops follow a line bearing southeastward, west of Babyhead postoffice and Lone Grove, and coming out southward very near the Wolf crossing of the Colorado river. Probably the best exposure of this belt is the Babyhead mountains, and its north- ern boundary does not cross the Llano county line. To the southeast good results may be expected as far as Miller's creek.
A second belt west of this ocenpies the area between Packsaddle and Riley mount- ains, and stretches northwestward by Llano town toward Valley Spring. Ores of value have been found in many places in this belt, the surface indications of the underlying beds of magnetite being hematite or limonite.
The third, or the Iron mountain belt, is that on which the greatest. amount of work has been expended, and in two places in it large and valuable masses of magnetic irou have been exposed. The bed is most persist- ent, and can be traced for miles. At Iron mountain a shaft has been sunk down the side of the iron onterop to the depth of fifty feet, and a cross-cut of twenty-two feet cut in the lead. The quantity of magnetite and hematite exposed here is very great. About three miles south of Llano City considerable prospecting has been done by drilling with a diamond drill, and also opened by a shaft, disclosing iron almost identical with the Iron mountain product.
The most western of these belts lies be- tween the Riley mountains and Enchanted Rock in the south, possibly having also a greater width to the northwest. While it is covered in places by later rocks, the indica- tions are good for the discovery of important masses of iron ore in it.
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In quality the magnetites are high-grade Bessemer ores, being low in silica, phosphorus and sulphur, and very high in metallic iron.
The hematite ores seem to be chiefly do- rived from alteration of the magnetites. They usually erop out along portions of the north- ern border of the magnetite area, and are chiefly segregations in sandstone, and al- though none of the exposures have yet been worked, valuable deposits will be found fol- lowing the trend of the magnetite beds. These segregations are to be found chiefly in the red sandstone of the Cambrian system. They will be of value as Bessemer ores.
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