MARBLE OF SOUTHEAST MISSOURI. 525 



quantities at long intervals, and is very handsome when polished. The colors 

 blend beautifully. It really is thus far the best appearing marble in Missouri, 

 both as to color, and arrangement of colors and texture. Its outcrop also shows 

 it to be durable with no appearance of injury from frost after the wear of ages of 

 exposure. Still, if used for outside work it would probably tarnish too much. 

 For mantles and table tops it will probably compare with Tennessee or any other 

 marble. 



The oldest known outcrop shows a deep red rock with occasional small 

 quartz crystals. The present excavation is small but shows beds from one foot 

 to one and a half feet in thickness, said to be thicker below. The rock seems to 

 be chiefly a pure limestone with many specks and lines of crystallized calcite, 

 often a greenish shade around the cystalline facet blending off gradually into red, 

 which often gradually deepens in color. 



The quarry known as the "Rasnick" quarry is about four miles south of 

 Ironton, on the head of Marble Creek, and the rock is here found for over a quar- 

 ter of a mile apart or probably a half mile to distant outcrops. Most of the beds 

 are rather shelly, but there are about two beds of good thickness, of uniform tex- 

 ture and handsome arrangement of colors. 



Young's quarry on north side of Marble Creek, near east county line of Iron 

 County, presents a face of twenty-five feet of rock extending for several hundred 

 feet along the bluff. The texture is very fine and traversed by buff veins of 

 coarser material. There are several other localities containing similar marble on 

 the head branches of Marble Creek. 



On Stout's Creek, four to six miles west of Ironton, are also outcrops of hand- 

 some marble. On head of Tom Luck Creek, in Reynolds County, are thick 

 beds of flesh-colored marble. 



At corner of Sections 5, 6, 7 and 8 of Township 32, Range 4, in Iron 

 County, the beds appear thus : 



1. Twenty-one feet of marble and conglomerate beds, including over twenty 

 layers varying in thickness from a half inch to a foot. 



2. Fifteen feet no rocks seen. 



3. Twenty-two feet including beds of conglomerate, shales and marble, the 

 latter shaded red, whitish and buff, but all in too thin beds to be valuable. Many 

 layers being only a half inch thick, but the colors are all handsome and uni- 

 formly specked with calcite. 



A general sectio^n of these marble beds as they occur in the northern part of 

 Madk^n County is about as follows : 

 Xi. Magnesian limestone. 



2. Eighteen feet of thick beds of silicious dolomite and thin shaly limestone 

 with Lingula lamborni. 



3. Twenty-three feet of gritty dolomite. 



4. Five to thirty feet of marble, 



5. Five to forty feet (as much as ninety feet near Mine La Motte) of sand- 

 stone. 



