Crawford County, Illinois - Chapter 1: Introductory, 1909

BOUNDARIES AND AREA OF CRAWFORD COUNTY - SURFACE CONDITIONS - TIMBER AND PBAIRIE LANDS - STREAMS AND THE REGION WHICH THEY DRAIN - GEOLOGIC FORMATIONS - DIFFERENT STRATA AND THEIR EXTENT - COAL MEASURES ABE MEAGER - IRON AND BUILDING-STONE - SOIL AND TIMBER - VARIETIES OF TREES AND AGRICULTURAL CROP PRODUCTS. l

In the official report of the geological survey of the State of Illinois, Crawford County is described as containing "seven full and several fractional townships, making an aggregate area of about 438 square miles. It is bounded on the north by Clark County, on the east by the Wabash River, on the south by Lawrence and Richland counties, and on the west by Jasper County. With the Wabash River on its eastern border, it is traversed by several small streams 'tributary thereto. The surface is generally rolling, and was originally mostly covered with timber, enough remaining, however, to supply the prospective demand for many years. The southwest portion of the county, from the Shaker Mills on the Embarras River, nearly to Robinson, is quite broken, and there are also belts of broken land of greater or less extent on all the streams. The principal water courses in the county tributary to the Wabash River are the Embarras, which runs diagonally across its southwest corner; the North Fork, traversing its western border from north to south; Crooked Creek, also in the southwest part, and Brushy Fork, Lamotte Creek, Sugar Creek. Hutson

Creek, and a few other smaller streams in the eastern portion of the county. Only a small proportion of the land is prairie. The few prairie stretches are generally small, and for the most part rolling, and are mainly confined to the northern and western portion of the county and to the bottom and terrace lands adjacent to the Wabash River"

- "GEOLOGICAL FORMATION. - The quaternary beds in Crawford County consist of buff or drab marly clays belonging to the Loess, which are found capping the bluffs on the Wabash, and attaining a thickness of ten to twenty feet or more, and from twenty to forty feet of brown gravelly clays and hard-pan, the latter resting upon the bed rock, or separated from it by a thin bed of stratified sand or gravel. These beds, if found in a vertical section, would indicate the following order of succession: buff and drab marly clays or sand, ten to twenty feet; brown and yellow gravelly clays, fifteen to twenty feet; bluish gray hard-pan, ten to twenty-five feet; sand or gravel, three feet. The superficial deposits are thin, and at most places the bed rock will be found within fifteen or twenty feet of the suriace. Small boulders are frequently met with in the branches, but large ones are quite uncommon, and they are more often derived from the limestone and hard sandstone of the adjacent coalmeasure beds than from the metamorphic rocks beyond the confines of the State, although $ome of the latter may be seen.

of the Wabash River, and the highest along the western borders of the county, including the horizon of coals, Nos. 11, 12 and 13, of the Hiinois Section. Our only knowledge of the underlying formations is derived from a shaft and boring made at Palestine Landing. This shaft was sunk to reach a coal seam reported in a boring previously made for oil, to be four feet 617.

thick, and at a depth of 123 feet. The boring showed two thin beds of limestone above the coal, and the bituminous shale proved to be: two feet thick, and the coal only six inches. In the western portion of the county but little coal has been found, and mining has been carried on in a systematic way only to a limited extent.

"IRON AND BUILDING-STONE. - Numerous bands of carbonate of iron occur in the shales on Lamotte Creek and in the river bank at Palestine Landing. Robinson is located on a sandstone deposit overlaying al] the rocks found in the bluffs at Palestine Landing, and the outcrops of sandstone, on the small branch of Sugar Creek that drains the section on which the town is built, show from fifteen to twenty feet in thickness of soft brown rock, in which considerable quarrying is done. North of Robinson, on the northeast quarter of Section 16, Township 7, Range 12, a much greater thickness of strata is exposed. The massive brown sandstone obtainable here affords very durable material for commercial uses. The best building stone to be found in the county is obtained north of Robinson. On Lamotte Creek, affording a cheap and lasting stone for foundation walls, bridge abutments, etc., and near Palestine Landing, has been obtained a good quality of carbonate of iron, good brick is manufactured from the subsoil of the uplands, and sand is found in the Loess deposits of the river bluffs and in the beds of the streams.

"SoIL AND TIMBER - From Hutsonville south there is a belt of alluvial bottom and terrace land, from one to three miles in width, extending to the mouth of Lamotte Creek, a distance of about ten miles. This is mostly prairie, and the soil is a deep sandy loam and very productive. The upland prairies have a chocolate colored soil, not so rich as the black prairie soil of Central Illinois, but yielding fair crops of corn, wheat, cats, clover, etc. On the timbered lands the soil is somewhat variable. Where the surface is broken the soil is somewhat thin, but the more level portions, where the growth is composed in part of black walnut, sugar tree, linden, hackberry and wild cherry, it is very productive, and yields annually large crops of all the cereals usually grown in this latitude. 'The variety of timber observable in the county are the common species of oak and hickory, black and white walnut, white and sugar maple, slippery and red elm, honey-locust, linden, hackberry, ash, red birch, cottonwood, sycamore, coffee-nut, black