USA > West Virginia > Hampshire County > History of Hampshire County, West Virginia : from its earliest settlement to the present > Part 18
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Germany five thousand seven hundred and forty feet deep gave a temperature of one hundred and thirty-five degrees. The rate of increase in heat is nearly the same in distant parts of the world, and gives us strong evidence that only the outer crust is cool, and that intense heat lies below.
When we look out upon our quiet valleys, the Kanawha, the Potomac, the Monongahela, or contemplate our moun- tains, rugged and near, or robed in distant blue, rising and rolling, range beyond range, peak above peak; cliffs over- hanging gorges and ravines; meadows, uplands, glades be- yond; with brooks and rivers; the landscape fringed with flowers or clothed with forests; we are too apt to pause before fancy has had time to call up that strange and won- derful panorama of distant ages when the waves of a vast sea swept over all; or when only broken and angular rocks thrust their shoulders through the foam of the ocean as it broke against the nearly submerged ledges where since have risen the highest peaks of the Alleghanies and the Blue Ridge. Here where we now live have been strange scenes. Here have been beauty, awfulness and sublimity, and also destruction. There was a long age with no win- ter. Gigantic ferns and rare palms, enormous in size, and delicate leaves and tendrils, flourished over wide areas and vanished. And there was a time when for ages there was no summer. But we know of this from records elsewhere; for its record in West Virginia has been blotted out. Landscapes have disappeared. Fertile valleys and undu- lating hills, with soil deep and fruitful, have been washed away, leaving only a rocky skeleton; and in many places even this has been ground to powder and carried away, or buried under sands and drift from other regions.
An outline of some of the changes which have affected the little spot in the earth's surface, now occupied by West Virginia, will be presented, not by any means complete, but sufficient to convey an idea of the agencies which enter into the workings of geology. It is intended for the young,
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into whose hands this book will come; not for those whose maturer years and greater opportunities have already made them acquainted with this sublime chapter in the book of creation.
When the crust of the earth had cooled sufficiently, rains washed down the higher portions, and the sands and sedi- ment thus collected were spread over the lower parts. This sand, when it had become hardened, formed the first layers of rock, called strata. Some of these very ancient formations exist yet and have been seen; but whether they are the oldest of the laver rocks, no man knows. Some of the ancient layers, of great thickness, after being depos- ยท ited at the sea bottoms, were heated from the interior of the earth, and were melted. In these cases the stratified appearance has usually disappeared, and they are called metamorphic rocks. Some geologists regard granite as a rock of this kind.
As the earth cooled more and more, it shrank in size, and the surface was shriveled and wrinkled in folds, large and small. The larger of these wrinkles were mountains. Seas occupied the low places; and the first brocks and rivers began to appear, threading their way wherever the best channels could be found. Rains, probably frost also, attacked the higher ridges and rocky slopes, almost desti- tute of soil, and the washings were carried to the seas, forming other layers of rocks on the bottoms; and thus the accumulation went on, varying in rate at times, but never changing the general plan of rock building from that day to the present. All rock, or very nearly all, in West Vir- ginia were formed at the bottom of the ocean, of sand, mud and gravel, or of shells, or a mixture of all, the ingredients of which were cemented together with silica, iron, lime, or other mineral substance held in solution in water. They have been raised up from the water, and now form dry land, and have been cut and carved into valleys, ridges, gorges and the various inequalities seen within our state. 18
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These rocks are sometimes visible, forming cliffs and the bottoms and banks of streams and the tops of peaks and barren mountains; but for the greater part of West Vir- ginia, the underlying rocks are hidden by soil. This soil, however, at the deepest, is only a few feet thick, and were it all swept off we should have visible all over the state a ' vast and complicated system of ledges and bowlders, carved and cut to conform to every height and depression now marking the surface. The aggregate thickness of these layers, as they have been seen and measured in this state, is no less than four miles. In other words, sand and shells four miles deep (and perhaps more) were in past time spread out on the bottom of a sea which then covered West Virginia, and after being hardened into rock, were raised up and then cut into valleys and other inequalities as we see them today. The rockbuilding was not all done dur- ing one uninterrupted period, nor was there only one up- heaval. West Virginia, or a portion of it, has been several times under and above the sea. The coast line has swept back and forth across it again and again. We read this history from the rocks themselves. The skilled geologist can determine, from an examination of the fossil shells and plants in a stratum, the period of the earth's history when the stratum was formed. He can determine the oldest and the youngest in a series of strata. Yet, not from fossils alone may this be determined. The position of the layers with regard to one another is often a sure guide in discov- ering the oldest and youngest. The sands having been spread ont in layers, one above the other, it follows that those on top are not so old as those below; except in cases, unusual in this state, where strata have been folded so sharply that they have been broken and turned over. Thus the older rocks may lie above the newer.
Unmeasured as are the ages recorded in the mountains and cliffs of West Virginia, yet the most ancient of our ledges are young in comparison with those of other parts
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of the world, or even of neighboring provinces. North of us is a series of rocks, the Laurentian of Canada, more than five miles thick, formed, like ours, of the slow accumu- lation of sand. Yet that series was finished and was prob- ably partly worn away before the first grain of sand or the first shell, of which we have any record, found a resting place on the bottom of the Cambrian sea which covered West Virginia. If the inconceivable lapse of years re- quired for accumulating shell and sand four miles deep in the sea bottom, where we now live, amazes us, what must we say of that vaster period reaching back into the cycles of the infant world, all of which were past and gone before the foundations of our mountains were laid! Nor have we reached the beginning yet. No man knows whether the Laurentian rocks are oldest of the layers; and if they are, still back of them stretches that dim and nebulous time, unrecorded, uncharted, penetrated only by the light of astronomy, when the unstratified rocks were taking form, from whose disintegrated material all subsequent forma- tions have been built.
Let us begin with the Cambrian age, as geologists call it. Within the limits of our state we have little, if any, record of anything older. Were a map made of eastern United States during that early period it would show a mass of land west of us, covering the middle states, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and beyond. Another mass of land would lie east of us, occupying the Atlantic coastal plain, from New England to South Carolina, and extending to an un- known distance eastward, where the Atlantic ocean now is. Between these two bodies of land spread a narrow arm of the sea, from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Alabama. West Virginia was at the bottom of that sea, whose eastern coast line is believed to have occupied nearly the position, and to have followed the general direction, of what is now the Blue Ridge. Sand washed from this land east of us was spread upon the bottom of the sea and now forms the
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lowest layers of rocks met with in West Virginia, the foundations of our mountains. But this rock is so deep that it is seen only in a few places where it has been brought up by folds of the strata, and where rivers have cut deep. For the most part of the state these Cambrian rocks lie buried, under subsequent formations, thousands of feet deep.
There were mountains of considerable magnitude in that land east of the sea. The country west of the sea must have been low. During the immense time, before the next great change, the eastern mountains were worn down and carried, as sand and mud, into the sea. The Silurian age followed, and as it drew near, the region began to sink. The sea which had covered the greater part of West Vir- ginia, or at least the eastern part of it, began to overflow the country both east and west. The waters spread west- ward beyond the present Mississippi. The land to the eastward had become low and not much sediment was now coming from that direction. The washings from the rounded hills were probably accumulating as a deep soil in the low plains and widening valleys. Over a large part of West Virginia, during the Silurian age, thick beds of lime- stone were formed of shells, mixed with more or less sedi- ment. Shell-fish lived and died in the ocean, and when dead their skeletons sank to the bottom. It is thus seen that the origin of limstone differs from that of sandstone in this, that the former is a product of water and the ma- terial for the latter is washed into water from land.
The character of rocks usually tells how far from land they were formed, and if sandstone, what kind of country furnished the material. The coarsest sandstones were deposited near shore, back of which the country was usu- ally high and steep. Fine-grained sandstones, or shales, were probably laid down along flat shores, above which the land had little elevation. Or they may have been deposited from fine sediment which drifted a considerable distance
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from land. If limestone is pure, it is proof that little sedi- ment from the land reached it while being formed. The limestone deposited over a considerable part of West Vir- ginia during the closing of the Cambrian and the begin- ning of the Silurian age forms beds from three thousand to four thousand feet thick. During the vast period re- quired for the accumulation of this mass of shells the land to the east remained comparatively flat or continued slowly to sink. We know this, because there is not much sedi- ment mixed with the limestone, and this would not be the case had large quantities been poured into the sea from the land.
Another great change was at hand. The land area east of us began to rise, and the surface became steep. What perhaps had been for a long time low, rounding hills, and wide, flat valleys, with a deep accumulation of soil, was raised and tilted; and the stronger and more rapid cur- rents of the streams, and the rush of the rain water down the more abrupt slopes, sluiced off the soil into the sea. The beds of limestone were covered two thousand feet deep beneath sand and mud, the spoils from a country which must have been fertile and productive. The land was worn down. Ages on ages passed, and the work of grinding went on; the rains fell; the winds blew; the floods came; the frost of winter and the heat of summer followed each other through years surpassing record. Near the close of the Silurian time the shore of the con- tinent to the east rose and sank. The vertical movements were perhaps small; they may have been just enough to submerge the coastal plain, then raise it above water; repeating the operation two or more times. The record of this is in the alternating coarse and fine sediments and sand composing the rocks formed during that time. At the close of the Silurian period the continent cast of us was worn down again and had become low. The sea cov- ering West Virginia had been cut off from the Gulf of St.
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Lawrence by an upheaval in the state of New York. The uplift of the land seems to have been much greater during this time north of us than south. The Devonian age followed, which was a great rock-builder in the north. The aggregate thickness of the Devonian rocks in Pennsylvania is no less than nine thousand feet. From there to southward it thins out, like a long, sloping wedge, until it disappears in Alabama, after thinning to twenty- five feet in southern Tennessee. In some parts of West Virginia the Devonian rocks are seven thousand feet thick. The sediments of which these strata were made were usually fine-grained forming shales and medium sandstones, with some limestones here and there. The long, dreary Devonian age at last drew to a close, and an epoch, strange and imperfectly understood, dawned upon the earth. It was during this age that the long summer prevailed; the winterless climate over the northern hemi- sphere; the era of wonderful vegetation; the time of plant growth such as was perhaps never on earth before, nor will be again. It is known as the Carboniferous age.
During that period our coal was formed. The rocks deposited on the sea bottom in the Carboniferous age ranged in thickness from two thousand to eight thousand feet in different parts of West Virginia. During this time there is evidence of the breaking up and redistribu- tion of a vast gravel bar which had lain somewhere out of reach of the waves since earlier ages. This bar, or this aggregation whether a bar or not, was made up of quartz pebbles, varying in size from a grain of sand to a cocoanut, all worn and polished as if rolled and fretted on a beach or in turbulent mountain streams for centuries. By some means the sea obtained possession of them, and they were spread out in layers, in some places hundreds of feet thick, and were cemented together, forming coarse, hard rocks. We see them along the summits of the Allegha- nies, and the outlying spurs and ridges, from the southern
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borders of our state, to the Pennsylvania line, and beyond. The formation is called conglomerate; and the popular . names are "bean rock," "millstone grit," etc. A heavy stratum of this stone forms the floor of the coal measures. The pebbles probably represent the most indestructible remnants of mountains, once seamed with quartz veins, but degraded and obliterated before the middle of the Carboniferous era, perhaps long before. The quartz, on account of its hardness, resisted the grinding process which pulverized the adjacent rocks, and remained as pebbles, in bars and beds, until some great change swept them into the sea. Their quantity was enormous. The rocks composed of them now cover thousands of square miles to a considerable thickness.
As the Carboniferous age advanced the sea which had covered the greater part of West Virginia since Cambrian time, was nearing its last days. It had come down from the Cambrian to the Silurian, from the Silurian to the Di- vonian, from the Divonian to the Caboniferous, but it came down through the ages no further. From that area where the waves had rolled for a million years they were about to recede. With the passing of the sea, rose the land, which has since been crossed by ranges of the Alleghany, Blue Ridge, Laurel Ridge, and all their spurs and hills. From the middle of the Carboniferous epoch to its close was a period of disturbance over the whole area under consider- ation. The bottom of the sea was lifted up, became dry land, and sank again. It seemed that a mighty effort was being made by the land to throw back the water which had so long held dominion. It was a protracted, powerful struggle, in which first the land and then the water gained the mastery. Back and forth for hundreds of miles swept and receded the sea. Years, centuries, millennials, the struggle continued, but finally the land prevailed, was lifted up and the waves retreated westward and south-
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ward to the Gulf of Mexico, and West Virginia was dry land, and it has remained such to this day.
Beds of coal, unlike layers of rock, are made above water, or at its immediate surface. While the oscillation between sea and land was going on, during the Carbonifer- ous age, West Virginia's coal fields were being formed. Coal is made of wood and plants of various kind, which grew with a phenomenal luxuriance during a long period of summer that reigned over the northern half of the earth. Each bed of coal represents a swamp, large or small, in which plants grew, fell and were buried for centuries. The whole country in which coal was forming was probably low, and it was occasionally submerged for a few thousand years. During the submergence, sand and mid settled over it and hardened into rock. Then the land was lifted up again, and the material for another bed of coal was ac- cumulated. Every alternation of coal and rock marks an elevation and subsidence of the land-the coal formed on land, the rock under water. This was the period when the sea was advancing and receding across West Virginia, as the Carboniferous age was drawing to a close.
Other ages of geology succeeded the Carboniferous; but little record of them remains in West Virginia. The land here was above the sea; no sediment could be deposited to form rocks, and of course there was little on which a per- manent record could be written. The strata underlying the greater part of our state grew thicker and deeper from the Cambrian age to the Carboniferous; then the sea receded, and from that time to the present the layers of rock have been undergoing the wear and tear of the ele- ments, and the aggregate has been growing thinner. The strata have been folded, upraised by subterranean forces and cut through by rivers. In some places the Carbon- iferous rocks have not yet been worn away; in other places the river gorges have reached the bottom of the Devonian rocks; in still other localities the great Silurian layers have
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been cut through; and in a few places the cutting has gone down deep into the Cambrian rocks. The Glacial age, the empire of "steadfast, inconceivable cold," which followed . the warm period in which coal was formed, did not write its history in West Virginia as indelibly as in some other parts of our country. The great morains and bowlders so conspicuous in other localities are not found with us. No doubt that the cold here was intense; perhaps there were glaciers among the high lands; but the evidence has been well nigh obliterated.
Land seems to have been lifted up in two ways, one a vertical movement which elevated large areas and formed plateaus, but not mountains; the other. a horizontal move- ment which caused folds in the strata, and these folds, if large enough, are ranges of mountains. In West Virginia we have both acting in the same area. Independently of the mountains, West Virginia has a rounding form, slop- ing gradually upward from three directions. Imagine the mountain ranges sheared off until no irregular elevations exist in the state. The resulting figure would show West Virginia's surface as it would be presented to us if no strata had been folded to make mountain ranges. This is the shape given by the vertical upheaval since the Carbon- iferous age, uninfluenced by the horizontal thrust of strata. The figure would show a great swell in the surface, the highest portion at the interlocking sources of the Green- brier, the Elk, the Potomac, the east fork of the Mononga- hela, and Cheat. From that highest point the surface slopes in every direction, as shown by the course of the rivers. There is a long, curved arm of the plateau thrust out toward the southwest, reaching around through Poca- hontas, Greenbrier. Monroe and McDowell counties, and overlapping into the state of Virginia. The New river, from the highlands of North Carolina, cuts through this plateau to join the Kanawha on the western side. The highest part of this rounded area is perhaps three thousand
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feet above sea level, not counting the mountains which stand upon the plateau; for, in order to make the matter plain, we have supposed all the mountains sheared off level with the surface of the plateau.
Having now rendered it clear that portions of West Vir- ginia would be high if there were not a mountain in the state, let us proceed to consider how the mountains were formed and why nearly all the highest summits are clust- ered in three or four counties. We have already observed that ranges of mountains such as ours are formed by the folding of layers of rocks. This is apparent to any one who has seen one of our mountains cut through from top to bottom, such as the New Creek mountain at Greenland Gap. Place several layers of thick cloth on a table, push the ends toward each other. The middle of the cloth will rise in folds. In like manner were our mountains forined. The layers of rock were pushed horizontally, one force act- ing from the southeast, the other from the northwest. Rivers and rains have carved and cut them, changing their original features somewhat; but their chief characteristics remain. The first upheaval, which was vertical, raised the West Virginia plateau, as we believe; the next up- heaval, which was caused by horizontal thrust, folded the layers of rocks which formed the plateau and made moun- tain ranges. From this view it is not difficult to account for so many high peaks in one small area. The mountain ranges cross the plateau, running up one slope, across the summit, and down the opposite slope. These ranges are from one thousand to nearly two thousand feet high, meas- uring from the general level of the country on which they stand. But that general level is itself, in the highest part, about three thousand feet above the sea. So a mountain, in itself one thousand feet in elevation, may stand upon a plateau three times that high, and thus its summit will be four thousand feet above the sea. The highest peaks in the state are where the ranges of mountains cross the
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highest part of the plateau. There are many other moun- tains in the state which, when measured from base to sum- mit. are as high as those just mentioned, but they do not have the advantage of resting their bases on ground so ele- vated, consequently their summits are not so far above sea level. To express it briefly, by a homely comparison, a five-foot man on three-foot stilts is higher than a six-foot man on the ground; a one thousand-foot mountain on a a three thousand-foot plateau is higher than a two thous- and-foot mountain near the sea level.
Exact measurements showing the elevation of West Vir- ginia in various parts of its area, when studied in connec- tion with a map of the state, show clearly that the area rises in altitude from all sides, culminating in the nest of peaks clustered around the sources of the Potomac, the Kanawha and Monongahela. The highest point in the state is Spruce mountain, in Pendleton county, 4.860 feet above sea level; the lowest point is the bed of the Potomac at Harper's Ferry, 260 feet above the sea; the vertical range is 4,600 feet. The Ohio, at the mouth of Big Sandy, on the boundary between West Virginia and Kentucky is 500 feet; the mouth of Cheat, at the Pennsylvania line is 775. A line drawn through the principal points in the state at an elevation of 1.000 feet, would not run round the state, but beginning in the southwest would follow a waving and zigzag course along the western side, across part of the northern side, and after being cut off by the high region of western Maryland, would reappear in the state. If we begin at the mouth of Crane creek, on Dry fork of Big Sandy, the one thousand foot level passes through the mouth of Dry branch on Tug fork, in McDowell county: it sweeps up the Kanawha valley to Sewell, in Fayette county, passes through Wood's ferry on the Gauley, and passes up the Elk to the line between Webster and Braxton counties. The line ascends the Little Kanawha to the mouth of Glady creek, in Lewis county. It
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sweeps up the Monongahela and Tygart's valley rivers six miles above Grafton, in Taylor county, and up the West fork to Weston. It ascends Cheat river to the mouth of Sandy, in Preston county. It crosses the North branch of the Potomac at Bloomington, in Mineral county, and ascends the South branch to the mouth of the North fork, in Grant county. The line is almost level with the tops of the mountains in Jefferson and Berkeley counties.
The fifteen hundred foot contour line, beginning at the mouth of Cucumber creek, in McDowell county, follows the upper valleys and ridges around to the New river beyond the Virginia line. Thus the fifteen hundred foot contour cuts our state in two along the valley of the. New river. The line returning along the face of the mountains north of New river, strikes the Greenbrier at Lowell sta- tion, and the Gauley at Hughes' ferry, the Elk at Addison, and the Little Kanawha at the boundary between Upshur and Webster counties. The line goes up the Buckhannon river to the mouth of Grassy run; up Cheat to St. George, in Tucker county. East of there the line leaves the state and enters Maryland; reappearing on the North branch below Elk Garden, and ascending the South branch to Deer rnn, in Pendleton county. The two thousand foot line crosses the south fork of Tug river near the Virginia line, in McDowell county; passes through Mercer county, crossing the Bluestone river at the mouth of Wolf creek. It crosses the Greenbrier at the line between Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties. It ascends Dry fork of Cheat to near the mouth of Red creek, in Tucker county, and crosses the North branch of the Potomac at Schell in Grant county. The higher contour lines enclose narrower areas until when four thousand feet is reached, only peaks project above. The general level of Pocahontas county is about three thousand feet above the sea. The bed of Greenbrier river where it enters Pocahontas is three thousand three hundred feet in elevation. Where Shaver's
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