GEOLOGY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY 127 



Road metal. The roads in the county are mostly poor, many 

 very poor. In the northern portion the east and west roads are 

 on glacial deposits and are fair, but the north and south roads 

 are largely in the vicinity of the streams, with their extensive sand 

 deposits, and are excessively sandy and poor. Back in the hills 

 the roads are usually not much traveled and are naturally not 

 well kept. But in places good roads have been constructed. Just 

 around Paul Smiths, specially on the road to the depot and thence 

 part way to Bloomingdale, recent great improvement ha*s been 

 made by covering the surface with a layer of stone broken by a 

 rock-crusher, then covering with fine material and rolling with a 

 lieavy steam roller. ,The rock used was obtained from! the abund- 

 ant, loose boulders of crystalline rocks in the vicinity, some of 

 which serve excellently well and some not so well. But the whole 

 makes a very good road and one that should stand for a long time 

 with the present moderate amount of travel, specially if kept in 

 good repair. The road from Tupper lake to Litchfield park and 

 those in the park itself are excellently made and though not 

 macadamized are carefully graded and covered with gravel. 



These roads furnish good object lessons to the community, and 

 the most excellent rock materials for road construction occur all 

 over the county, so that it would nowhere be a matter of great 

 expense to obtain such. The larger diabase dikes, the gabbros 

 and much of the anorthosite and syenite furnish perhaps the best 

 material among the Precambrian rocks, either for a single course 

 of broken stone or for the upper layer of a Telford road. The 

 more durable layers of the less quartzose gneisses would also 

 serve fairly well. 



Some of the purer and firmer portions of the Calciferous forma- 

 tion would also furnish capital road material either singly or for 

 the lower course of a Telford road. 



The Potsdam sandstone, which is used as a road material 

 around Potsdam, is wholly unfit for such purpose, as is almost 

 any sandstone, since it breaks down more or less rapidly to a pure 

 quartz sand, with the result that the last stage of the road is 

 worse than the first. 



