Note on the Coals of the Kanawha Valley. 273 



thickness is attended with some difficulty, as the dip is 

 undulating, and there may be one or two broad anticliuals. 

 There is no reason to believe, however, that it is any thinner 

 than the upper division. We have here, then, a total thick- 

 ness of not less than eighteen hundred feet, with about 

 twenty coal seams, most of them workable at some point. 

 The extraordinary development of this group continues 

 southwesterly, until its thickness becomes about twenty- 

 five hundred feet in Tennessee. A careful survey of the 

 State of West Virginia would doubtless reveal some very 

 important facts in this connection, and would tyd in solving 

 some perplexing problems arising from this variation. 



The Mahoning sandstone is conspicuous in the river hills 

 above Charleston, and, as in its northern extension in this 

 state and Pennsylvania, holds about midway a coal which 

 frequently becomes of available thickness. It rests upon a 

 variable bed of black flint, five to twelve feet thick, which is 

 occasionally associated with a thin seam of cannel. 



A few feet below the flint, and separated from it by shale, 

 often arenaceous, is a coal partly cannel and partly bitumin- 

 ous. At Cannelton it is five feet four inches thick, and on 

 Paint creek, near Coalburg, it is seven feet. This is usually 

 regarded as identical with the Upper Freeport of Pennsyl- 

 vania (VI of Ohio). Aside from its position one finds in 

 its deportment evidence of this identity, since, wherever I 

 have observed it in West Virginia, it shows a decided 

 tendency to become partly cannel. Though I have not 

 visited Peytona, yet an examination of the map, and the 

 fact that Coal river heads near that locality and so cannot 

 have cut very deeply into the country, seem to render it 

 probable that this coal, known locally as the "Stockton 

 seam," is the same with the cannel there worked. It seems 

 hardly possible that the "Gas coal," situated five hundred 

 and fifty feet below the "Stockton" at Cannelton, can be 

 available at Peytona. 



At Cannelton a five feet coal is seen a few feet below the 



