DEFIANCE COUNTY. 429 



many places— indeed, every where that fresh-water sections of the Drift 

 banks disclose their composition. It is not necessary to describe it here, 

 as its characters have been fully detailed in many places. Where it is 

 not overlain by the laminated, fine clay, as it is at Defiance, it forms a 

 surface soil that, in level tracts, is rather clayey, with but little gravel. 

 In more rolling districts, as in Milford, and the north-west portions of 

 Hickville and Farmer townships, it becomes not only gravelly, but 

 even stony. Perpendicular sections of it in such rolling districts often 

 show that it is largely composed of beds of obliquely stratified gravel and 

 sand, such beds also sometimes embracing stones and bowlders of con- 

 siderable size. These beds of stratified gravel and sand are scattered 

 through the whole thickness of the deposit, but in most places are most 

 abundant at or near the top. There is almost always a bed of a few 

 inches, or a few feet, of sand and gravel between it and the rock. Typi- 

 cal, gravelly soils that are based on this deposit prevail in Milford, 

 Hickville, and Farmer townships, as already mentioned. In most of 

 the rest of the county, where this deposit forms the basis or subsoil, the 

 immediate surface is much changed by marshy and vegetable accumula- 

 tions, and the country is there known as Black Swamp, from the flatness 

 and blackness of the surface. This constitutes by far the larger portion 

 of the entire county. The ridge on which Williams Center is situated 

 is formed of this kind of Drift. 



Horizontal laminations of fine clay locally cover the foregoing hard- 

 pan clay, and in Defiance county sometimes show a thickness of fifteen 

 feet. This character may be seen on the north side of the Maumee, at 

 Defiance, and for five or six miles toward the west, where it becomes 

 overlain with a loose, sandy loam, which appears to be also marly, some- 

 what resembling the alluvium of streams. In some places the finely 

 laminated clay seems to graduate into a sandy loam that constitutes the 

 fourth condition of the Drift to be described. This may be particularly 

 seen along the Tiffin River, in Tiffin township. These laminations are 

 usually entirely free from stones. They graduate insensibly between 

 very fine sand and clay. Their color is not an essential character — a 

 statement which is also true of all parts of the Drift. The original color 

 of the Drift seems to have been blue, and that color is seen at the depth 

 of ten or twenty feet below the surface in all cases, whether it be hard- 

 pan or stratified Drift. The region where this fine, laminated condition 

 of the surface of the Drift exists, is a belt from three to six miles wide, 

 running north and south through Defiance, Noble, and Tiffin townships. 

 It lies apparently on the western half of this tier of towns. It has not 

 been seen to extend on the east side of the Tiffin and Auglaize, except 



