Huntington County, Indiana - Chapter 1: Physical Features, Geology, Etc, 1914

Huntington County - Location and Boundaries - Water-Courses and Drainage - Altitudes - Geological Formation - The Niagara Limestone - The Wabash Arch - A "Gold Mine" - Lime Kilns and Quarries - The Wabash-Erie Trough - The Glacial Epoch - How the Course of the Wabash Was Determined - Moraines - - Clay Deposits - Remains of Prehistoric Animals - Oil and Gas - Fossils - Mineral Springs - Timber.

Huntington County is situated in the northeast quarter of the State of Indiana. It is bounded on the north by Whitley County; on the east by Allen and Wells counties; on the south by Wells and Grant, and on the west the County of Wabash. Near the northern boundary it is crossed by the forty-first parallel of latitude and it is about midway between the eighty-fifth and eighty-sixth meridians of longitude. In form the county is a rectangle, sixteen miles in extent from east to west and twenty-four miles from north to south, with an area of 384 square miles, or 245,760 acres. Measured by the lines of the official survey, the northern boundary is the line separating Congressional Townships 29 and 30, and the southern boundary is the line separating Townships 24 and 25. The western tier of civil townships, four miles in width, lies in Range 8 east, and the eastern boundary of the county is the line separating Ranges 10 and 11.

west of the City of Huntington it is joined by the Little River, or Little Wabash, which enters the county near the northeast corner and flows southwestwardly through Jackson, Union and Huntington town¬ ships. Its principal tributaries are Bull, Cow and Calf creeks, which enter it from the west, and in Union Township there is a small tributary called Mud Run. Clear Creek flows south through the township of that name and empties into the Wabash near the west line of Huntington Township. Loon Creek rises in the southern part of Rock Creek Town¬ ship and flows northwest, emptying into the Wabash just below the Town of Andrews. The Salamonie crosses the southern boundary about three and a half miles west of the southeast corner and flows by a sinuous course through Salamonie, Jefferson, Lancaster and Polk town¬ ships. Its principal tributaries are Logan, Prairie and Richland creeks. These streams, with a number of smaller ones, afford ample natural drainage to practically all parts of the county.

The general surface of Huntington County is a level plain, unmarked by any prominent hills or elevations, with an average altitude of about seven hundred and eighty feet above sea level. At Huntington the elevation above tide water is 741 feet; at Markle, in the northeast corner of Rock Creek Township, it is 814 feet, and at Warren, two miles from the southern boundary, it is 831.

In geological formation Huntington County belongs to the Upper Silurian era. In his report for 1875, State Geologist Cox says: "The only rocks exposed, in place in this county, are of the paleozoic age and belong to the Niagara epoch. * * * The most eastern outcrop of the Niagara, in the county, is at Markle on the Wabash River. The rock here is quarried from the bed of the river. It has a blue-gray color, irregular fracture, is in four to six-inch layers, and in this part of the county is a favorite building stone. The section exposed in the river bank at Markle is :

Professor Cox also found outcrops of the Niagara limestone on the Salamonie River, a mile below Warren, and at other places in the vicinity, where John A. Lewis and Elisha Christman were operating lime kilns. Another outcrop was observed at the bridge over the Wabash River, one and a half miles south of Huntington, sixteen feet above the bed of the river. "This stone," says he in his report, "was used in the bridge abutments, but already shows signs of rapid decay by crumbling under the influence of water and frost. The principal part of the bed is an earthy limestone, and presents the appearance of a very good hydraulic stone. ' '

The greatest development of the Niagara in the county found by Cox in that survey was along the banks of the Little River, both above and below the City of Huntington. Concerning the outcrops in this part of the county, he says: "The most easterly crop is on John Mc¬ Carty's land on Section 18, Township 28, Range 10, about three and a half miles from Huntington. From this point east it remains covered by drift and is penetrated at the depth of eighty-eight feet by the Fort Wayne well. Lime kilns have been established all along the crop, and the burning of lime constitutes one of the chief industries of the county. ' '

In his report mention is made of thirty-one kilns then in active operation. Of these kilns eight were of the class known as perpetual and the others were occasional kilns which required to be completely discharged and cooled before refilling. A more complete account of the lime industry will be found in Chapter XII.

Beginning at Kentland, in Newton County, and passing eastward across the state, at each outcrop of the Niagara rock is found evidence of a disturbance of the strata. This line of disturbance is called by State Geologist Maurice Thompson "The Wabash Arch." He thinks the upheaval occurred near the close of the Niagara period and that the Wabash River follows pretty nearly the summit of an anticline. The evidences are seen most clearly in Newton, Carroll and the western part of Cass counties; but, according to Thompson, "At Wabash, Lagro, Huntington, Marion and Decatur we find at every outcrop the unmis¬ takable signs that we are still skirting along the northern edge of the Wabash arch."

Cox noticed these evidences of an upheaval in 1875 in the dips of the Niagara rock at various exposures. Says he : "Just along the west edge of Huntington, quarries have been opened at several places, running north from the river, for flagging and building stone. * * * At the appears to be 8° in the direction of 40° east of south. The chert is in large detached masses and mixed with buff magnesian limestone. North, seventy yards, at another quarry, the buff magnesian limestone is free from chert, but is schistose and false bedded, with an apparent dip of 20° at the south part of the quarry, but going back some ten yards the apparent dip is 37° S. 40° E. Half a mile down the stream the rocks at the river edge dip about 80° S. 70° E. * * * At dam No. 1 across the Wabash River, two miles below Huntington, the Niagara rock ap¬ pears along the left bank of the stream and served for one of the abutments of the dam. The beds are thin and cherty and much weath¬ ered on exposed ledges. The rock forms the bed of the river and pre¬ sents a vertical face ten and a half feet in height on the left shore, while in the bottom on the opposite side of the river it is entirely replaced by the drift. A few feet below the dam there is a slight anticlinal axis, the dip being 4° S. E. on one side of the crown and 4° N. W. on the other. ' '

Concerning the dips and angles noticed at various places along the Wabash, Cox says: "The great disorder of the strata, mainly due to false bedding or peculiar arrangement of the material constituting the present rocks, has led many to infer that this irregularity was due to earthquake or volcanic action. This is the more deceptive since the ap¬ parent elevations have their surfaces capped with enduring beds of chert or impure flint, and along the local waves in the strata stand in elevated knobs which fancy has construed into volcanic cones. Hunting ton is located on one of these flint ridges and the locality was known to the Indians by the name of ' We-pe-cha-an-gan-ge' or flint place. The flint of this locality was of great value to the Indians as the material of which they fashioned their arrow points, spear points and knives. ' '

With the exception of small particles of iron ore at a few places, the Niagara limestone in Indiana is without metals of any kind. About the close of the Civil war there was considerable excitement over the dis¬ covery of a metal resembling gold at the Drover quarry, in Huntington County. A Mr. Backus took samples of the ore to New York, where some one examined them and reported the value of the precious metal to be $158 to the ton. A company was then organized and about $10,000 worth of stock sold. With the money paid for the stock, machinery for a stamp mill was purchased. The investment was an unfortunate -one for the company, as the rock upon actual test proved to be absolutely barren of any metals of value. When Professor Cox visited the county in 1875 the place where Mr. Backus obtained his specimens was pointed out to him, and upon investigation he found the "gold" to be nothing more than "iron pyrites partly decomposed on the surface and filling isolated cavities in the cherty, magnesian limestone." All the stock¬ holders realized from their investment was what they received for their machinery, which was sold for a fraction of its original cost. This ended the search for precious metals in Huntington County.

If the failure to find gold was a disappointment, wealth in another form has been found in the magnesian limestones of the Niagara forma¬ tion in Huntington County. The lime made from this stone is what is known as "cool" or slow setting, and is constantly being shipped to a wider territory as it gains in favor. In the manufacture of paper it has been found superior to the lime made from pure calcium carbonate, and for that reason it is used by a number of paper mills and strawboard factories throughout the Middle West.

What is called by geologists the "Wabash-Erie trough" enters the county near the northeast corner, curves southward along the western face of the Wabash ridge to the south line of Jackson Township, where it turns westward. A short distance above the City of Huntington it expands to a width of about two miles, but narrows again after passing the city and enters the Wabash Valley about two miles below. This trough, or depression, is altogether about thirty miles in length, and about twothirds of it is marshy prairie, through which flows the Little Wabash, or Little River. A large part of the marsh consists of peat beds some four feet in thickness, underlaid with blue clay, and below this is the bottom of the Niagara limestone. Geologists believe that this trough was once the outlet of Lake Maumee and the St. Joseph and St. Mary's rivers. Says Thompson, in his report for 1888 "The water in this channel may have had originally a depth of seventy feet, and the river which the post-glacial man may have seen there was comparable with the Niagara itself. ' '

Probably no phenomena have proven more perplexing to students of geology than those which occurred during what is called the glacial epoch, and which brought about the destruction of vast beds of rock and the distribution of their fragmentary remains over a wide expanse of territory far from their original localities. For illustration : The large bowlders found in all parts of Indiana, commonly called "niggerheads, ' ' are of a granitoid character, belonging to beds that are nowhere represented in the state, and must have come from some place probably far distant. Various theories have been advanced to account for these conditions, but the one most generally accepted by scientists is that known as the glacial theory.

The Glacial epoch corresponds to the Pleistocene period of geologic time, sometimes called the ' ' Ice Age, ' ' and comprises the earliest portion of the Quarternary period. During the latter part of the Tertiary period, preceding, there was a gradual lowering of temperature through¬ out what is now termed the north temperate zone, until the entire surface of the earth was covered with large bodies of ice called glaciers. These glaciers were formed by periodical or intermittent snows, between which that which had already fallen became so compressed by its own weight that the entire mass was in time converted into one solid body of ice.

Pressure upon the yielding mass of snow, before it was completely congealed, imparted motion to the glacier, which carried with it rocks, soil and other mineral substances. As it moved forward the grinding and equalizing work of the glacier ultimately wrought great changes in the topography and meterological conditions of the region over which it passed, and, in fact, of the entire north temperate zone. Not only were mountain peaks in the path of the glacier worn away and the general leveling of the earth's surface brought about, but also vast quantities of earth and sand were carried forward by the streams of water formed by the melting ice and deposited in the ocean. By this means the shores of the continent were pushed forward during a period of several cen¬ turies and the superficial area of the land was materially increased.

As a general rule the course traveled by the North American glaciers was toward the south. One of them extended over Canada and the northern part of the United States, reaching from the Atlantic seaboard to the Rocky Mountains and covering the entire basin of the Great Lakes. When the ice melted, the rocks and other debris carried along by the glacier were left to form what is known as the glacial drift - -also called till, bowlder clay and older diluvium. As the glacier moved slowly along - probably not more than one foot per day - the bowlders and other hard minerals at the bottom, pressed constantly downward by the gigantic mass above, left marks or scratches upon the bed rock. From these marks or striaa the geologist has been able to determine the course of the glacier with reasonable accuracy by noting the direction of the striae. After examination of these striae by different state geologists at various places they have reached the conclusion that the glaciers came into Indiana from a direction almost north and south. Thompson, in his report for 1888, says the striae at Huntington indicate that the glacier there was moving in a course a little west of south.

The accumulation of earth and stone carried by the glacier was sometimes heaped up along the margin, where it formed a ridge or deposit called a lateral moraine. When two glaciers came together, as sometimes happened, the ridge formed at the point of conjunction is called a medial moraine, and is easily distinguished by the geologist. The nearly level deposit under the body of the glacier is known as the ground moraine and the ridge formed at the farthest point reached by the glacier is the terminal moraine. The Valley of the Ohio River was the terminus of the glacier that once covered Huntington County, and the channel of that stream owes its origin to the melting of the ice and the flow of water which always underlies the bed of a glacier. As the melting process went on, the terminal margin withdrew to the north¬ ward, and wherever there remained undestroyed rock barriers they formed natural dams that gave direction to the waters of the terminal moraine. In this way the course of the Wabash River was determined, or at least modified, centuries before the first white man set foot upon the Western Hemisphere. To quote from Thompson's report for 1888 : determined the course of the Wabash river, just as it also determined the form of the drift mass immediately south of it. The river itself is running along the general line of a wide fracture or system of fissures in the Niagara rocks from Wabash to Logansport. At the latter place it has cut through a spur of the Devonian formation, and at Delphi it curves around the base of a curious conical up-lift of the Niagara lime¬ stone. To my mind it is plain that the river simply follows the example of the ice current which went before it, plowing out the great furrow which we call the Wabash valley. At the present, evidence is wanting to prove any theory as to what particular part of the glacial age was devoted to the work of channeling out a groove for Indiana's greatest river, but it would appear that this must have been the first result of the glacier's contact with the low but compact and stubborn knobs of the Wabash Arch. Subsequently, as the ice field grew in weight and power, it arose and surmounted the barrier, grinding away its conical peaks and tearing out of its hollows in many places the non-conformable Devonian and Carboniferous rocks."

In some portions of North America the lateral moraines rise to a height of 500 or even 1,000 feet. The terminal moraine in Northern Indiana that marks the southern boundary of the Great Lake basin, contains a number of mounds that are from 150 to 200 feet high, and the "existence of a grand moraine lying across central Indiana has been fully demonstrated." Along the line of this great terminal moraine the contour of the drift mass is found to be comparatively regular, the glacial debris having been more uniformly deposited. Great local changes have taken place in the surface of the drift since it was first deposited. Upon the retreat of the ice the whole drift area was left bare and desolate, accompanied by an arctic temperature and without either animal or plant life. The barren surface was leveled and modified by the rain and wind during the period that elapsed before the northward emigration of plant life began to clothe it with a garment of resistance and render it habitable for animals. How long that period may have been geologists can only conjecture. It was by this method that the surface of Huntington County was formed.

In some parts of Central Indiana, near the "grand moraine," the glacial drift ranges from 800 to 500 feet in depth. Concerning the depth and character of the drift in Huntington County, Cox says : ' ' The only well-marked evidence which I saw of terminal moraines in this county lies along both banks of the Little and Wabash rivers. * * *

The drift covers the entire county and can not be less than 100 to 130 feet thick over a great portion of the tableland. The upper portion is com¬ posed of irregular beds of sand, clay and gravel. Bowlders and hard plastic clay lie at the base. The larger bowlders, ' Roches moutonnees,' lie along both shores of Little river and Wabash river at an elevation of 40 to 50 feet above the streams. They are particularly abundant above and below Huntington on the right bank of Little river. Their surfaces are scratched and grooved, but I was unable to find glacial scratches on the stratified rocks where they are exposed to view. This may, in part, be due to the fact that no fresh surface of the upper layers wTas seen, and the readiness with which the Niagara weathers would soon obliterate all traces of such marks. From the manner in which the bowlders lie along the borders of Little river, one is led to the conclusion that the stream has cut its way between two lateral moraines. A very large granite bowlder, weighing many tons, lies in the bed of Little river three and a half miles above Huntington, which, from a fancied resemblance in shape to a saddle, has received the name of ' Saddle Rock. ' This bowlder rests immediately on the Niagara, which is here seen in the bed of the river for the last time as you ascend the stream, and is not again found above the surface in an easterly direction before reaching the borders of Ohio. The large beds of sand found in the upper part of the drift are particularly valuable in this part of the state, since they furnish the only source from which this essential ingredient of good mortar can be had. There is a very large deposit of sand in the northwest border of Huntington. It is ten or twelve feet thick and the lines of deposition present the characteristic features of what is termed in rock strata 'false bedding.' The sand from this pit is held in high estimation by masons and plasterers and finds a ready market."

In his report for 1905 State Geologist Blatchley said: "In Huntington county the mantle of drift averages thinner than those adjoining, but yellow clays, suitable for brick or tile making, occur in a number of places. At Huntington, the surface clay used for brick making runs sixteen to thirty inches in thickness, with practically no stripping. Below thirty inches the clay becomes 'too strong,' with some lime pebbles in it."

At Tribolet Brothers, five miles southeast of Huntington, Blatchley found a good brick-making clay, with a stripping of eight inches of soil, and at Bippus the stripping was only six inches. At the latter place, and also at Majenica, he found a blue clay suitable for brick and tile making.

The principal elements that go to make up the drift formation in Indiana are silica, alumina, lime and iron. Silica is found in the clays, sands and bowlders ; alumina in the clays and bowlders ; lime in the clays, marls, chalk and peat-like bog deposits, and the iron in the swamps, in the form of bog ore, or in the gravel deposits. Coarse garnets, of little or no value, have been found in some places, but, as a rule, the glacial drift is void of gems of any commercial importance.

At widely different places in the glacial drift of the United States have been found the remains of prehistoric animals of the Miocene period, but which became extinct in the Pleistocene, or Ice Age. The most common of these are the bones of the mastodon - so called on account of the shape of the teeth - an animal allied to the elephant of modern times. The summer of 1881 was one of drought. Many wells in Hunt¬ ington County failed and in some neighborhoods there was barely enough water for domestic purposes, live stock sometimes suffering for a suf¬ ficient supply. Abraham Oliver, then living upon the northeast quarter of Section 10, about a mile and a half southeast of Plum Tree, selected a swampy place on his farm and employed some men to sink a well, hoping to find water. About five feet below the surface the diggers struck something solid, and upon investigation found the obstruction to be the were taken from the well, as well as a rib four feet two inches long, part of a tusk four feet long and weighing eighty pounds (the whole tusk was afterward found and measured eleven feet in length) ; and a bone supposed to be the one running from the knee to the pasture joint was three feet long. The discovery was made on Tuesday, September 13, 1881, and the following Sunday a number of people from the City of Huntington and other towns went out to see the bones, but Mr. Oliver, probably in anticipation of a visit from curiosity seekers, had locked the fragments of the prehistoric animal in an out-building and gone visiting. He afterward procured a tent and exhibited them at county fairs.

A few years later part of a skeleton of a mastodon was unearthed by some workmen engaged in digging a ditch on the farm of Thomas Mc- Crum, located in Section 2, in the Loon Creek Valley, in the northern part of Lancaster Township, and in the collection in the museum in the city free library of Huntington are the fragmentary bones of one of these extinct animals that were found while excavating a cellar in the city. The finding of these remains afford conclusive evidence that all of what is now Huntington County was once in the pathway of the great glacier that covered practically all of Northern and Central Indiana.

Both natural gas and petroleum have been found in paying quan¬ tities in the southern part of Huntington County. Natural gas has been described as "a member of the paraffin series (hydrocarbons), a combi¬ nation of carbon and hydrogen, about 60 per cent as heavy as air and highly inflammable." It is composed of marsh gas, or methane, formed by the destructive distillation, carried on through centuries, of animal and vegetable matter of the plants and animals that existed in the Trenton period, the porous limestone of that formation serving as a reservoir for the oil and gas thus created, though both oil and gas have been found in the Corniferous limestone of the Devonian formation and the Huron sandstone of the Sub-Carboniferous period.

The first effort to find gas in Huntington County was made by boring a well just south of the Little River at the City of Huntington. The drill went down 1,034 feet and penetrated the Trenton limestone to a depth of thirty-nine feet, but no gas was found. Well No. 2 was drilled about two and a half miles east of the city, on the north side of the river. Here the drillers went to a depth of 1,012 feet, but with no better re¬ sults than had been obtained in well No. 1.

Petroleum in commercial quantities was first produced in Indiana in 1889, in a well drilled near the Village of Keystone, in the southern part of Wells County. As this is not far from the Huntington County line, it was not long until prospectors began looking for oil in the valley of the Salamonie River, where a number of wells producing both oil and gas were subsequently drilled. In his report for 1903 State Geologist Blatchley says :

' ' The area of Huntington County producing oil in commercial quan¬ tities is practically limited to the southern halves of Salamonie, Jefferson and Wayne townships, along the southern border of the county. Some of the sections in this area rank high as producers, the average initial production and length of life of the wells equalling any similar area in the petroleum field of the state. It is not probable that the area of pro¬ ductive territory in the county will ever be found to extend any distance north of the townships mentioned, though it may, in time, cover the greater portion of their northern halves."

At the time that report was issued the Huntington Light and Fuel Company were still operating the northern half of Jefferson Township for natural gas and the greater part of Wayne Township was producing gas in paying quantities. Eight square miles in the southeast corner of the township showed a number of producing oil wells. Probably the deepest well ever drilled in the county was that on the southwest quarter of Section 16, in Wayne Township. According to the state geologist, "it came in as a dry hole, with the following record:

In 1900 a field was opened up just west of the Town of Warren, but the wells proved to be light producers and short-lived. A more detailed account of the development of the oil and gas fields of the county will be found in the chapter on Finance and Industries.

Referring again to the Niagara limestone, it is worthy of remark that a study of the fossils found in this formation give geologists some idea of its age. When Professor Cox made his survey of the County of Hunt¬ ington in 1875 he found at the Drover quarry "masses of the Favosites Niagarensis so large as to lead at once to the belief that the entire bed of stone was derived from an ancient coral reef."

Abner R. Large, of Mount Etna, most of the specimens having been found in the Niagara limestone beds of the county. It is to be re¬ gretted that in the description of fossils geologists have not found some common English term to express their ideas, but they have not done so, and the only way left to the historian is to describe them according to the classification made by scientists.

The principal groups of fossils found in the country are as follows: 1. The Brachiopoda, the distinguishing feature of which is the brachial valve; 2. The Gasteropoda, the fossil remains of a small animal that lived in a spiral shell, something like that of a snail; 3. The Cephalopoda, the shell of which is described as a longicone with corrugated rings, or, in some varieties, smooth and gradually tapering to a point ; 4. The Trilobita, the shells of which are of conical form with three well-defined lobes.

Of the first group a very fine specimen of what is called the Dinobolus Conradi was found at Huntington, and a picture of this fossil has been reproduced in the state geologist's report for 1903, on page 489. It is somewhat rare. A more common fossil of this group is the Conchidium trilobatum, which is found in rather plentiful quantities about Hunt¬ ington, but not elsewhere in the Niagara beds along the Wabash River. The shell is a bivalve, something in appearance like that of an oyster, each valve or shell being three-lobed, from which the fossil derives the last part of its name.

In the second group several fine specimens of the fossil Pleurotomaria have been found in the vicinity of Huntington. This is a conical spiral shell, one species of which, the Pleurotomaria pauper, appears in the form of casts or moulds in the Huntington quarries. Another species, the Pleurotomaria axion, in which the shell is somewhat longer and subconical, is quite rare, but one very fine specimen was found a few years ago at Huntington. In the same group are the Murchisonia, with an elongated shell. Fragments of the Murchisonia sp. undet are quite com¬ mon, but perfect fossil of this species is rarely found. A very long spiral shell of the Murchisonia bivittata, found at Huntington, is now in the collection of the state museum at Indianapolis. One peculiar fossil of the group takes its name from the locality where it was found and is called the Oristoma H anting ensis.

The fossils of the third group are abundant about Huntington and in the quarries of the county, with the exception of few species, such as the Orthoceras annulatum, the Trochoceras desplainense, and the Trimeroceras Gilberti, though a few specimens of these rare varieties have been found in the county.

only one species has been found in this county. It is known as the Encrinurus Indianensis, and the three lobes of the shell are covered with small knobs or diversified by small ridges.

Near the old Leedy stone quarry, on Section 22, a short distance west of Andrews, Cox found a strong chalybeate spring in 1875, which he thus describes: "It rises up above the surface of the ground and flows over the side of the gum curbing in a bold stream ; it is strongly charged with iron, and is cool and pleasant to the taste. The water possesses valuable medicinal properties, is close to the thriving village of Antioch, on the Toledo, Wabash & Western Railroad, and might be made a place of resort for invalids who require a mild tonic."

On Section 14, about a mile northeast of the above spring, is another mineral spring in which salt (chloride of sodium) and sulphur are the predominating ingredients. Cox also found an artesian well, which had been bored for coal oil, on the bank of Silver Creek, concerning which he says :

"No record could be found of this bore, but it is supposed that the water comes from a depth of about six hundred feet, and flows out at the top of a wooden pump stock, four or five feet above the surface. Judging by the taste, it is strongly impregnated with chloride of sodium and other mineral salts, and emits a strong odor of sulphuretted hydro¬ gen mixed with marsh gas, carbureted hydrogen. The existence of the latter gas, in the boggy places along the creek, led to the selection of this locality as one most likely to furnish oil, from the well-known fact that carbureted hydrogen usually accompanies the oil in the famous wells on Oil Creek, Pennsylvania. In this case, however, no oil was obtained. Anywhere in the marsh near the well, if a stick is run down into the mud and vegetable matter, carbureted hydrogen will escape, and if touched with a lighted match takes fire and burns. This well is pe¬ culiarly interesting, since it lies almost midway between Fort Wayne, where a well was bored to the depth of 3,000 feet, and Wabash, where a well went to a depth of 2,270 feet, neither of which found water that would rise to the surface."

When the first white men came into Huntington County to establish their homes and develop the country they found the surface covered with a heavy growth of timber. The great, primitive forests contained many fine specimens of black walnut, poplar, white oak, ash, maple, burr and red oak, hickory and other valuable varieties. But at that time the soil was more valuable for cultivation than the timber. The result was that very many trees were cut down and burned that, if they were standing today, would be worth more than the land upon which they grew. Then no thought of a timber famine ever entered the minds of the pioneers. Far away to the west and northwest stretched the bound¬ less forest, and to the frontiersman it seemed, if he ever gave the subject a thought, that there would be timber enough to supply the wants of the people for centuries to come. The ax, the fire-brand and the sawmill have done their work so thoroughly that now, though less than one cen¬ tury has passed, the timbered area of the county has been much reduced. Now the question of conservation of the American forests is a subject that is much discussed. Had the work of conservation been commenced at the time Huntington County was settled, much of the timber might have been saved, but would the people of the present generation act differently than did the pioneers, under the same conditions? Prob¬ ably not.