Johnson County, Missouri - Chapter 1: - Geology, 1918

FORM.-VTIOX - GEOLOGICAL DIVISIONS - DRILLINGS IN JOHNSON COUNTY - SHAFT AT SUTHERLAND, JOHNSON COUNTY - PLEASANTON FORMATION IN JOHNSON, CASS AND JACKSON COUNTIES - THE WARRENSBURG SANDSTONE - GEOLOGY AND SOII^AUTHORITIES.

Formation. - Back of the liistorv of the people of Johnson county, of the men and women who have Hved on its soil and dug in its earth, is the history of that earth and soil itself. What is more, the history of that earth has actually determined to a remarkable extent the history of these men and women. The crops we raise to feed our bodies, the habitations we build to shelter them and the fuel we burn to warm them were, for us, predetermined thousands and millions of years ago.

When the earth "was without form and void,"" it was probably a hot unorganized mass of material. Under the operation of the force of gravity, the heavier materials drew together in the center, and the lighter ones went to the outside. At the outer edge were the lightest gases forming the atmosphere. Next came the heavier gases forming the oceans that evidently first covered the globe. Then came the outer layer of the solid earth coinposed of rocks two to three times the weight of the water. While in the center of the earth are materials, probably metalic, proved to be five and a half times the weight of water.

Gradually this molten mass, with its oceans of boiling water began to cool, and as it did so. it formed a crust on the outside. As it kept on cooling, it became smaller, and the solid crust in endeavoring to accommodate itself to the diminishing interior would wrinkle. The ridges of these wrinkles became the dry land and the hollows the oceans. Some of the wrinkles would break or become too thin and the pent up hot materials underneath the crust would break through in volcanoes.

sometimes a former ridge or uplift would become a hollow under the sea and the sea bottom would be raised to thousands of feet above the water, and smaller wrinkles would come in the ridges and hollows themselves. Thus we have two great ridges, the eastern and western hemispheres, and two great hollows the oceans between. The western hemisphere is itself wrinkled into the ridges of its mountains, and the hollows of the plains between.

Johnson county is on one of the earliest formed ridges in the United States. This is the Ozark ridge or uplift, which is said to be far older than the Rocky mountains. In eastern Kansas this uplift divides into two sections as it goes eastward, a northern one beginning in Cass county and continuing east down to the Lamine district, and a southern part lying in southern Missouri and Arkansas. The northern section contains Johnson county.

After this Ozark uplift arose from the ocean, the crust composing it became exposed to all the "weathering" we see now going on. Under the heat of the sun, the freezing of winter and the washing of the rains, the rocks disintegrated, and soil was formed. Then organic life entered the world, and on this soil, plants grew and developed, and animal life came in the water and on the land.

For a long time, Johnson county, like many parts of the earth that had been lifted above the oceans, was very low and close to or partly covered by the water. The trees and ferns and other plants dropped their leaves and branches into the water, and thus accumulated a great mass of vegetation, underneath the water. Then a new, probably small, wrinkle in the earth's crust was so formed or some shift in the crust so made that the county and all the neighboring shore of the then great sea went down into the water.

As the ages went by, the dry land surrounding Johnson county was gradually washed down into the sea and covered this county and the neighboring sunken area. The mass of vegetation that had accumulated was thus buried, compressed and decomposed and became the earliest or lowest coal vein in the county.

In course of time the filling up of this sunken area or another uplift in the earth's crust or both these causes resulted in the surface of the county again being above or near the surface of the water. The nearest vegetation gradually spread until again the county was covered with it. Again the surface and all this mass of vegetation was submerged, covered again by washings from the uplands, and Johnson county's second coal vein was formed. This process was repeated till the land finally emerged for good, with its numerous coal veining and stores of fuel for its future inhabitants.

At different periods of the county's submergence, conditions were favorable for sea life, and millions of primitive sea animals lived and died and their bones dropped to the bottom till the floor of the sea was covered thick with their remains. These remains became covered in the same way as the vegetation that made the coal, were decomposed and compressed and formed limestone rock.

Geological Divisions. - The age at which these processes went on is called by the geologists the Carboniferous, and the layers of the earth's crust formed at this time have been divided in the United States into three series, called the Mississippian, (at the base) the Pennsylvanian (in the middle) and the Permian (at the top). The Mississippian of Missouri contains a very large portion of crystalline limestone, in strong lithologic contrast to the Pennsylvanian, in which shale is preponderate, sandstone common and the limestone chiefly of the fine-grain type. The Permian series does not differ markedly from the Pennsylvanian, but it has not been found in Missouri.

The Pennsylvanian series in Missouri is composed of about 1,900 feet of shale, sandstone, limestone, clay and coal. It is the only formation containing commercially important coal beds and is the youngest consolidated formation in the area in which it outcrops. It includes beds that are contemporaneous with formations of the Appalachian region.

In Missouri the Pennsylvanian series is subdivided into the Missouri and Des Moines groups. The Missouri group is divided into five formations, which outcrop in the northwestern part of the state and in Jackson and Cass counties. The Des Moines group consists of the Pleasanton, Henrietta, and Cherokee formations which outcrop in Johnson county and over a strip of territory extending from Clark county in the northeast corner of the state to Barton county in the southwest part of the state, varying in width from thirty to about one hundred miles. The United States Soil Survey also gives a Bethany Falls limestone which occurs in the northwest part of the county.

The Pleasanton formation, the outcrop of which reaches the western part of Johnson county varies in thickness from one hundred to two hundred and twentv-five feet. The Henrietta formation, which takes its name from a former Johnson county postof^ce, varies in thickness from twenty-six to one hundred and ten feet. This formation outcrops over a considerable portion of Johnson county. Underlying the Henrietta formation and extending to the Mississippian limestone is the Cherokee formation, which varies from seventy-five to seven hundred and ten feet in thickness. This formation outcrops in the eastern portion of Johnson county, and it is in this formation that the thickest beds of coal are found in this county. All these formations are composed of shale, sandstone, limestones and coal beds.

The most important economic deposits are in the Cherokee formation. Here we find coal, shales and clays used for firebrick, pottery, common brick, tile, and other ceramic products, sandstone and other building stones. Judging by analogy from the composition of this formation, from the Kansas fields, and from the rather meager results from drilling in Missouri, it is considered probable that any gas and oil accumulations that may exist in this state also lie in this formation.

Drillings in Johnson County. - In central Johnson and neighboring counties on the north and northeast, most of the upper Cherokee strata assume characters that are persistent as far north as the Iowa line.

Pleasanton Formation in Johnson, Cass, and Jackson Counties. - Broadhead determined the thickness of the Pleasanton formation in Johnson, Cass, and Jackson counties to be one hundred seventy-six feet and constructed the generalized section given below in modified form: features of the state are two long narrow channels filled with sandstone and shale wdiich have been eroded in Cherokee, Henrietta and some Pleasanton strata. One of these is in Henry, Johnson and Lafayette counties and the other in Randolph county.

The length of the Warrensburg channel of sandstone is more than fifty miles and is believed to have been made by water flowing from higher country on the Ozark dome bringing with it sands, and muds.

It extends from north of Louis station, Henry county, northward to the north bluffs of the Missouri river. It passes through Johnson county from the south line near the village of Post Oak directly north into Lafayette county. The city of Warrensburg is about in the middle of the channel.

The Warrensburg sandstone is well exposed in the northwestern quarter of the Calhoun quadrangle (Sections 28 and 29, T. 43, N., R. 25 W), where over one hundred and six feet of it outcropped.

West of Post Oak village in Johnson county, the top of the channel of sandstone is on the level with the top of the Henrietta formation, but nothing is known of its depth. It contains rather large specimens of silicified wood. Between this and Warrensburg a number of wells that do not reach the bottom of the sandstone show it to be at least ninety feet thick.

At Warrensburg the channel is one to two miles wide and at least eighty-seven feet and possibly 175 feet deep. A drilling two and onehalf miles north of Warrensburg penetrated 75 feet of sandstone and 100 feet of soft, dark sandy shale, the former a channel deposit and the latter of either Warrensburg or Cherokee Age. The bottom of this drilling is at least 105 feet above the horizons of limestones of the Henrietta formation in neighboring counties.

A description of the sandstone quarries north of Warrensburg is given elsewhere in this volume. The sandstone here has a light gray or gray-blue color, is crossbedded in places and contains films of Carbonaceous material in the bedding planes and irregularly distributed fragments of coal. Microscopic examination showed it to consist of small roundish to subangular quartz grains in a calcarious and ferreugenious cement with subordinate amounts of calcide, mica, chlorite, ionoxide, bitumen, feldspar and clay.

like shape of the bottom of the channel. Irregular deposits of coal have been found just below the sandstone, and in the bed of the branch in the northwest quarter of section 26, township 46, range 26, there are two beds of limestone dipping at a high angle and overlaid by arenaceous channel deposits.

In northern Henry county the base of the sandstone in the lowest point yet found is at least 77 feet and at Warrensburg 105 feet below the base of the Henrietta formation. The fall south of Warrensburg, according to these figures is 1.4 feet per mile, and north of Warrensburg about two feet per mile. The apparent diiiference in fall is due possibly to the greater amount of limestone through which the channel was cut at the southern end. The hypothesis of northward flow obtained from the data given above rests on the very probable assumption that at the time of the making of the channel, the beds through which it was excavated were horizontal or nearly so.

Geology and Soil. - All the soil of Johnson county is derived from the decomposition of these immediately underlying limestones, shales and sandstones, which were formed in the long geological ages of the past. They fall in the five groups, described - the Pleasanton shales, the Henrietta limestones, the Cherokee shales and sandstones, the Bethany Falls limestone and the Warrensburg sandstone. Their characteristics are given elsewhere under the chapter on Agriculture.

Authorities. - Hinds and Greene, stratigraphy of the Pennsylvania Series in Missouri; U. S. Department of Agriculture, Soil Survey of Johnson County, Missouri (1914) : John A. Gallaher (of Johnson county) in Encyclopedia of History of Missouri, Vol. Ill ( 19()1 ) ; Standard Texts on Geology.