NE-SAW-JE-WON 



Lake Whittlesey 



Advance of the ice raised the level of the Arkona waters 

 about forty-four feet and ushered in a new lake which is 

 named Lake Whittlesey, for an early Ohio geologist. (Figure 

 8.) That Lake Whittlesey lasted for a long time is shown by 

 the fact that it had time to fill in the bays and to build one of 

 the strongest, straightest beaches in the lake region. The beach 

 was used as a highway by Indians, and later by white men, 

 from the time of the earliest Indian travel. In a direct line 

 like a railway embankment, it crosses the valleys of creeks 

 that formerly entered Lake Arkona, and in places it stands 

 twenty to twenty-five feet above the old valley floors to the 

 south. Such a strong beach must have been made by rapidly 

 rising water moved by powerful waves. The material for it 

 was torn from the earlier-built Arkona beaches, but when the 

 Whittlesey waters were so deep that bottom water was below 

 the level of wave action the Arkona beaches were protected 

 from wave cutting and thus preserved. Rivers flowing into 

 lakes Maumee and Arkona built deltas into the lakes, but 

 deltas and stream valleys were drowned by the rising Lake 

 Whittlesey. Thus, at first the shore had many wide estuaries 

 into the heads of which the rivers then built new deltas, as 

 streams are now filling the headwater levels of the drowned 

 bays and estuaries of the Atlantic coast from Maine to Vir- 

 ginia. But the new deltas above and back of the old did not 

 bulge into the lake beyond the beach, hence the peculiar con- 

 dition of deltas of Whittlesey time fitting into the beach like 

 insets in a mosaic. Gravel operators who procure gravel from 

 this old beach often find the gravel cut out by the fine 

 material of the inset deltas. However, near Alden, New York, 

 a small delta made by a stream flowing into Lake Whittlesey 

 buried the eastern end of the Arkona beaches ; and in Canada 

 glacial rivers developed such strength that they built deltas 

 along the northern shore. The location of the ice barrier 

 which retained this lake has been traced more precisely than 



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