LETTER OF TRANSMITTAL. Vll 



The mineral riches of Gilmer and Lewis consist largely of 

 oil, gas and coal deposits, aside from the ordinary clays, and 

 shales for brick making, and sandstone for building purposes. 

 There is some limestone in Gilmer County, and much more of 

 it in Lewis, so that this important element of soil fertility, often 

 distributed only in nodules through the red shales, is one of the 

 factors which have made both counties famous as agricultural, 

 horticultural, and grazing districts. The economic geology map 

 shows that both counties lie within the great Appalachian oil and 

 gas belt which passes entirely across West Virginia from Han- 

 cock County on the north to Wayne and Mingo on the Kentucky 

 border, a distance of more than 200 miles, just west of and rudely 

 parallel to the trend of the most western ridge of the Alleghany 

 Mountains. Many people fail to comprehend why oil and gas 

 do not exist in commercial quantity in the Alleghany Mountain 

 regions of the State, or eastward, and considerable money has 

 been wasted in prospecting for these minerals where the quest 

 is hopeless. TRe reason of their absence from old mountain 

 regions like the Alleghanies and the areas to the eastward is that 

 the rocks of those counties, like Preston, Tucker, Grant, Min- 

 eral, Hardy, Randolph, Pocahontas, Greenbrier, Summers, Mon- 

 roe, Mercer, etc., etc., have been fractured and faulted by the 

 great folding to which they have been subjected so that practi- 

 cally all the natural gas and petroleum that they may once have 

 held have escaped into the air, during the ages that have elapsed 

 since the process of folding and mountain making began, and 

 hence unless one were to drill to depths of 6,000 to 10,000 feet 

 in such mountain regions as those of the counties mentioned, and 

 others east of them, there is no chance whatever of finding either 

 oil or gas in commercial volume. It is barely possible that deep 

 down several thousand feet below the surface in these mountain- 

 ous regions of the State the shaly beds of the stratified rock 

 series may have so shingled over the cracks and crevices which 

 penetrate all non-plastic beds like sandstones, limestones, etc., 

 as yet to imprison commercial quantities of these hydro-carbons, 

 so abundant in most of the counties of West Virginia lying west 

 of the mountain region of the State, but even this slight possi- 

 bility is extremely doubtful, and should not be relied upon with 

 any degree of confidence whatever. 



