May, 1904.] Changes in the Drainage Near Lancaster. 153 



width, the hills are 150 to 200 feet high and rise rather abrupth' 

 on either side. It then widens until it enters Clear Creek where 

 its width is again about one mile. From a short distance west of 

 Delmont the drainage is to the eastward, emptying into the 

 Hocking at lyancaster. Between Delmont and Ivancaster the 

 valley is filled to a considerable depth with heavy and irregular 

 deposits of drift into which the streams have cut deep trenches. 

 From Delmont a small stream also drains to the westward into 

 Muddy Prairie Creek of which more will be said later. The 

 divide at Delmont between the two is very low and scarcely 

 noticeable on passing over it on the railroad. Delmont is proba- 

 bly the site of an old col. The depth of drift over this col is 

 unknown, but less than half a mile to the west, at the school- 

 house and also at a point a short distance east of the schoolhouse 

 at an elevation about the same as that of Delmont, wells were 

 sunk to a depth of about 180 feet and no rock was encountered. 

 These wells are not situated in the center of the valley but near 

 the north wall. It is possible that, after the blocking by the ice 

 front of the old outlet of Clear Creek toward the northwest, and 

 prior to the cutting down of the old col near the present mouth 

 of Clear Creek, the waters of this region had an outlet over a low 

 col at Delmont, and might have eroded it to a considerable depth. 

 The ice, advancing farther, might have blocked this outlet and 

 caused the cutting down of the col on the lower part of Clear 

 Creek. 



Muddy Prairie Creek, as has been mentioned, rises in the 

 valley at Delmont on the western side of a low drift divide. It 

 flows southwestward, in places cutting deeply into the drift filling. 

 About two miles southeast of Delmont it leaves this broad valley 

 and enters a narrow one between high hills, in spite of the fact 

 that the drift divide between it and Clear Creek is only a few feet 

 high ; it is so low, in fact, that when it was proposed to drain 

 Muddy Prairie, a large peat swamp formerly existing in the 

 stream near this point, the engineers advised cutting through this 

 divide to Clear Creek. The valley which it follows into the hills 

 is only a few hundred feet in width, and an observer standing in 

 the broad valley which the stream has just left and facing the 

 entrance into the hills would not even suspect that it was any- 

 thing but a ver}^ short tributar}- coming in at this point. It is 

 borilered by terraces of roughly stratified drift 60 to 100 feet or 

 even more above the present floor. The soil on the flood- plain is 

 peaty and the stream very sluggish, in places cutting only a few 

 inches below the surface. There are no wells from which the 

 depth of drift beneath the valley floor could be obtained. The 

 stream continues in this way with no noticeable variation in the 

 width of its valley for a distance of a mile, when it widens some- 

 what and becomes more rapid, but half a mile beyond is suddenly 



