TUSCARAWAS COUNTY. 75 



and its specific gravity is usually not so high as to arrest attention. Its 

 valuable properties are therefore so much masked that it was rather by 

 accident than othervv^ise that Mashet, in 1801, discovered the value of 

 the blackband of Scotland, and laid the fouadation of the great iron 

 industry of that country. To a practiced hand the greater weight of the 

 iron-bearing shales will serve for their detection, but where the quantity 

 of iron contained can hot be conveniently measured, a sufficient test 

 will be afforded by buraing a heap of the shale in the open air or else- 

 where, when, if it contains iron enough to be valuable, this will "loop," 

 as it is said, that is, will agglutinate and form scoriaceous masses of 

 great density. 



When subjected to the action of the weather the blackband ore decom- 

 poses like any other shale, and its carbonaceous matter being removed 

 by oxidation, it falls into a mass of thin brown or rusty flakes, which, 

 though looking no more like iron ore than the unchanged material, 

 should be recognized by the explorer, for this is the only form of the ore 

 which will be exposed to his examination in natural outcrops. 



The geological position of the blackband of Tuscarawas county is, as 

 has been stated on a preceding page, imaaedlately above Coal No, 7 and 

 at the base of the Barren Measures. This is a strongly marked iron 

 horizon, although the ore found here varies considerably in character. 



It would seem that this ferruginous deposit was made by the drainage 

 from a surrounding land area into a circumscribed basin of compara- 

 tively shallow water. In some parts of this basin carbonaceous mud 

 heavily charged with iron accumulated, which subsequently formed the 

 blackband ; in others clay without vegetable matter, but generally 

 containing considerable iron, and this, as is usual in such cases, sub- 

 sequently segregated to form nodules of kidney ore. In the deeper 

 portions of this basin, where the water was clearer, a limestone was 

 deposited, and this also, in some localities, contained iron enough to 

 become a valuable calcareous ore, now known as mountain ore. These 

 three kinds of material were precipitated almost simultaneously, and they 

 are frequently found to alternate one with another, so that along a some- 

 what extended outcrop the ore worked will be in one place blackband, 

 in another mountain ore, and in a third shell ore ; and also on one side 

 of a hill Coal No. 7 may be overlain by a sheet of blackband even eight 

 or ten feet in thickness, while on the other side of the same hill no 

 blackband occurs, but instead some other form of ore, or even barren 

 material. Wherever blackband and mountain ore are found together, as 

 they frequently are, the former is always beneath the latter, from which 

 we learn that it was really deposited first. Generally, in such cases, 



