4l8 CHARLES S. PROSSER 



from 325 to 350 feet. It furnishes railroad ballast and good 

 glass sand. Fossils occur abundantly in zones varying in thick- 

 ness from an inch to several feet. The most perfect specimens 

 may be obtained from the beds of sand from the disintegrated 

 rock, and frequently from pockets of sand in the partly 

 weathered rock. Spirifer are?ios2is and other common species of 

 the formation in New York are abundant, together with species 

 which are restricted to its southern distribution. There are 

 numerous springs along the contact of the Helderberg and the 

 Oriskany sandstone. The formation is named from outcrops 

 near Oriskany Falls, in central New York ; is known as No. VII 

 in Pennsylvania; and is the Monterey sandstone of the Piedmont 

 folio. 



Romney formatio7i. — This formation enters the county on the 

 eastern side of Iron Ore Ridge, northeast of Flintstone, crosses 

 it and covers a large area to the east, north, and west of Old- 

 town, then alternates with the Oriskany areas in the southern 

 central part of the county, and finally crosses in a V-shaped 

 area — the eastern arm west of Nicholas Mountain, the point 

 along Evitt's Creek, and the western arm passing through the 

 eastern part of Cumberland. The western area enters the county 

 at Ellerslie, crosses it to the Potomac River, and then extends 

 southwest to the bend in the river at Keyser, W. Va. 



The transition from the Oriskany sandsone to the black 

 shale of the Romney is ver}^ abrupt, as may be seen at various 

 exposures of the contact, especially east of the church on the 

 Williams Road, two and one half miles southeast of Cumberland, 

 and at Monster Rock on the W. Va. Central Railroad, near 

 Keyser, W. Va. The lower part of the formation is composed 

 of thin black shales, weathering to a rusty brown, in which are 

 some bands of bluish-gray limestone about 150 feet above the 

 base. This portion of the formation is well shown in the two 

 railroad cuts just north of the Twenty-first Bridge on the Balti- 

 more and Ohio Railroad. The black shales contain specimens 

 of Liorhy7ichus liniitaris and other small fossils, and in lithological 

 characters a^ree with Marcellus shale of New York or No. 



