THE PREGLACIAL DRAINAGE OF OHIO. 57 



up into gentle swells, and smoothed out into graceful undula- 

 tions, and the food in the "glacier's grist" was so digested and 

 assimilated that hill and dale rejoiced in verdure unsurpassed, 

 and there was left as our inheritance, as fine a grazing and wheat- 

 growing section as the sun shines on. 



But our old water-ways were obliterated, filled with drift 

 to hundreds of feet above their holding, and new drainage 

 ■channels must be created ; a few of which, together with their 

 mode of creation I will attempt to describe. The Clear Fork 

 of the Mohccan, followed, in part, the old channel to near Perrys- 

 ville, but was here obstructed in its course to the Black Fork 

 gorge by drift; the obliterated channel being now distinguished 

 by two small lakes — or kettle holes between the high gravel 

 knolls that turned the waters. The deflected stream then 

 cut a new channel southeast to the Mohecan, its newness be- 

 ing demonstrated by numerous falls, the most picturescjue being 

 Lyons Falls, where the stream cuts down into the crumbling 

 red sandstone of the Waverly immediately below the Carbonifer- 

 ous conglomerate of an outlying coal hill, revealing many and 

 beautiful casts of fossil. The Black Fork was blocked by mo- 

 rainic material where the Killbuck lobe of the glacier became 

 fixed on the Loudonville hills; but it found a col a mile below the 

 village, where the diverted Clear Fork rejoined it, and, uniting 

 their forces they cut a narrow gorge through hills that now stand 

 425 feet above the rock bottomed and rock banked Mohecan. 

 Here a mountain of sand stone and shale is cut in two as you 

 would cut a loaf of bread. The next col is at Lake Fork where, 

 because their old channel in the Big Prairie was walled up by 

 a glacial dam now i8o feet high, the Muddy and Jerome Forks 

 of the Mohecan were compelled to mingle their waters and tear 

 down a low breach in the hills at Fort Tyler into a gorge 200 

 feet deep, and 3 miles long, through a divide, to gain — ^at Roch- 

 ester a pre-glacial channel coming down from Mohecanville. 



This channel of waters — now called Lake Fork — followed 

 to above Lakeville, where they were again staggered out of their 

 course by the hill like obstructions of glacial debris that here 

 stopped transit in the axial trough, and, they must a second time 

 cut a way through high conglomerate hills for 7 miles to join 



