HISTORY OF FAIRFIELD COUNTY
CHAPTER I.
GEOLOGY.
1
the low lands, and of weights varying from a few pounds to several tons. The largest one yet discovered in the County lies partially buried in the ground, in the corner of the enclosure near the east bank of Bald- win's run, about two miles northeast of Lancaster. Its two principal diameters have been estimated to be eighteen and sixteen feet. Another of very considerable dimensions lies on the slope of Mount Pleasant, and near its summit. They are Quartzites, Granites and Diorites, as also of other kinds of hard rock. Some of them are exceedingly hard, as they must have been to withstand the grinding processes they were subjected to in floating, or perhaps rolling down from the mother beds far to the north, and from which they were torn away by the ponderous ice glaciers that moved down the continent, grinding and forcing their way over rocks and mountains as they came, until, by the melting of the ice, they were left scattered all over the face of the country. Some of these boulders were found to be limestone; and in some localities of sufficient quantity to be collected and broken up for the limekiln. Such use has been made of them in Fairfield County. The drift clay is not found in the elevated lands, but always in the table lands, and always below the gravel terraces, which shows it to have been deposited by the waters before the glacial Drift set in; and it is believed a long interval of time intervened between the two eras. The material of which these border terraces are formed was undoubt- edly brought down by the general Drift flood, and distributed along the valleys and water courses in the form of deposits, merely. The terrace planes are found mixed, however, more or less, with the wash from the adjacent hillsides, in particular localities. The Drift beds, from their light and gravelly make up, are usually easily drained, and lying on the borders of water courses, for the most part, they become eligible sites for towns and cities, many of which are built upon them. Lancaster stands on a drift bed-all that part of it lying below the hill, and it is more than probable that the elevation passing through the town from north to south, and known and spoken of as the "hill," was entirely formed during the Drift age. It contains no ledges of sand rock, as the hills surrounding the town do; and besides, beds of blue clay have been found on its slopes, at great depths below the surface. In sinking a well on the east slope, in 1862, at the depth of from forty to seventy feet, trunks and limbs of corniferous trees were found imbedded in the blue clay Drift. Professor Andrews, in his Geological Report for 1872 and 1874, says: "When we carry back the study of our surface Geology to the period immediately antecedent to the Drift, we find that all the leading valleys had been eraded by the same system of surface drainage which now exists. The general surface features of the whole State were the same as now. The Scioto, Hocking and Licking rivers drain by their upper waters much of the central and level portion of the State, a region now covered with a mantle of Drift materials. They drained the same area before the Drift. "The Drift period was of immense duration, and the great northern currents, with their floating ice bergs, with loads of debris from northern regions, would, in time, be able to cover the bottom of the shallow sea with the materials we now find, and arranged as we now find them.2
3
distance back in both directions. The color of the Fairfield sandstone varies from a clear white to yellow of different tints, some of it quite dusky. The greater portion of it is, however, of a light yellowish hue. Some of the formations are considerably firm in texture; others softer. It has been found that when dressed and laid in walls, it hardens by exposure, and it is believed it will endure the ravages of time even better than limestone. Fairfield sandstone is largely shipped to other parts of the State for building purposes. The cathedral, at the corner of Broad and Fifth streets, Columbus, is almost entirely built of Hock- ing sandstone, and the new court-house at Lancaster is wholly of sand- stone, quarried in sight of the building. There is sandstone sufficient in Fairfield county to build a hundred cities. Some of the ledges are of great thickness, without a fissure in them. They underlie all the hills of the southern part of the county, and crop out from many of them, especially along Hocking quite down to the county line. Mount Pleasant is simply an immense sand-rock from top to bottom, and extending to an unknown depth below the surface. In some instances the ledges extend hundreds of feet without a crack; in some places they are cleft and fissured, and it is not uncommon to see large masses of the solid rock detached from the main body, and pre- cipitated down to the low lands, as if by some internal convulsions of the earth. There are detached fragments of all sizes, some of them possibly amounting to hundreds and thousands of tons weight. Some of the sandstone formations show supposed traces of iron. A very wonderful geological phenomenon presented itself a number of years ago, to which the attention of the writer was called at the time. The Lilly brothers, stone cutters, in the preparation of a large block of yellow sandstone that had been brought from the hills south of Lancaster to be wrought into a monument, came across an Indian flint arrow head imbedded in the solid sandstone. The sandstone was moulded nicely to it on all sides, so that the flint, when finally liberated, left its mould perfect and smooth. The flint was very white, forming a sharp contrast with the yellow sandstone in which it was imprisoned. The position where it was found was several inches from the outside of the block. The stone-cutter fixed the point at which the flint was found at about ten feet from the outside surface of the rock, as it originally existed before the quarry was opened. Two points are indisputably settled by the discovery, viz: first, that the flint arrow point was artificially formed; and secondly, that it was formed before the rock, no matter at what age of the world either event occurred. In some of the hills about Lancaster, as also in other parts of the county, the sandstone material is found in concrete masses in combina- tion with gravel, sand, and clay, thus forming conglomerates of exceed- ing hardness, and which are used for bouldering, and as foundations for buildings. They are also found to make very strong walls for adobe work. What has been known as "Green's Hill," and the hill upon which the South Schoolhouse stands, are examples. The bodies of both hills, as far as they have been penetrated, are conglomerate, underlaid with deep beds of a fine quality of building sand, especially Green's Hill.4
The upper strata of the Waverly sandstone, which is known to lie immediately below the coal measures, is found in the hills facing Rush creek, where it passes between the two villages of Rushville. It is finer grained than the stones at Waverly, but not sufficiently hard to be used for building purposes. In Rush creek bank, a little below the mill south of the village of Rushville, there is a vein of sandy shale of a bluish hue, indicating vicinity of coal. Its thickness is ten or twelve feet, and in it are contained moluscan fossils; but those that belong to the Waverly formation are found in the upper strata. There is also, in the same vicinity, a very thin stratum of coal, and rocks that usually characterize coal beds. Beyond this there are no other evidences of the presence of coal; nor are there within the bounds of the county, so far as has ever been discovered, any available coal beds. The lower stratum of the Waverly stone appears in the margins of the ravines at Lithopolis, in Bloom township. This specimen is exceedingly fine grained, and bears all the characteristics of the typical Waverly stone, as originally discovered. Its color is light drab, its tissue even, and easily worked. Fairfield county is not known to have any coal. If there be coal below its surface it is out of reach by the ordinary means of mining now in use. But the near proximity of apparently inexhaustible coal fields, and with easy and rapid facilities for transportation, it can never feel the privation. The same is true of iron. So far as known there is no iron in Fair- field county. Some of its surfaces indicate the not very remote pres- ence of iron ore, and some specimens of sandstone show apparent streaks of the iron tinge. Some of the fragments of rock, when lifted, are of a greater weight than ordinary stone, which has given rise to the belief that iron ore existed in the hills, but none has ever been found. The great wealth and sources of wealth of the county exist in its vast stone quarries, and in the richness and arability of its soil, so that in all time to come it can never fail to vie with any other interior county of the State in the extent of its resources. Its timber, with prudent economy and with coal for fuel-coal obtained from the Muskingum mines, the Sunday creek mines, Perry county mines, from Shawnee, Straitsville, and the Hocking Valley, all lying within distances ranging from twenty-five to not exceeding thirty-five miles---places Fairfield in a position equal, if not superior, to any interior county of the West. The idea is not yet wholly abandoned that lead exists in the county, and that it will some day be discovered. The reliance, however, rests wholly on the traditions brought down from the Indian times, the cir- cumstances of which are written in the chapter on Indians, found in another part of this volume.5