WASHINGTON COUNTY. 457 



17,280 acres, and a total in the two valleys within the limits of Wash- 

 ington county of 32,640 acres. The largest deposits of limestone strata 

 are perhaps those found along Wolf Creek, but they are so low in the 

 valley — indeed, often in the bed of the stream — that they produce little 

 fertilizing effect. In Adams, Salem, and Liberty townships there are 

 valuable deposits of highly soluble limestone, which are of the utmost 

 agricultural importance, and give to many farms a rich and almost self- 

 perpetuating soil. Such limestones are not altogether wanting in sev- 

 eral other townships, but are most abundant in the townships named. 

 The smoothest lands in the county, and those most attractive to the eye, 

 excepting the more immediate river valleys, are found on the slope 

 drained by the branches of Wolf Creek, in the townships of Barlow, 

 Watertown, Palmer, etc. Tbey are not, perhaps, the richest, for there is 

 a deficiency in limestone ; but they lie beautifully, and in their gentle 

 undulations and gradual slopes are in marked contrast with the abrupt 

 hills so common in other parts of the county. Taken as a whole, the 

 soil of Washington county is in quality above the average of that of the 

 counties of southern Ohio. Even its most rough and forbidding hills 

 have, by the frugal and industrious German population, been rendered 

 productive and attractive. 



General Geological Features. — The county lies wholly within the Coal 

 Measures, and in the upper portion of the series. There are no other 

 geological formations represented within the county, if we except the 

 surface materials which constitute the Drift terraces of the Muskingum 

 and Ohio valleys, which are of Quaternary age. There is in Barlow, on 

 the northern slope of the Wolf Creek waters, the probable evidence of 

 an ancient lake bed, which is also, doubtless, Quaternary in age. The 

 Drift terraces constitute a uniform series of ancient gravel banks and 

 sand bars, formed at a time when the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers were 

 at a far higher stage than now. The materials of these terraces were 

 brought from the north, from areas once covered by large deposits of 

 sand, gravel, bowlders, etc. Duck Creek and Little Muskingum are not 

 sufficiently far north to reach these Drift areas, and, consequently, no true 

 Drift terraces are found upon them. On the Little Muskingum and 

 Duck Creek I have noticed some terraced banks, but they show none of 

 the extra-limital materials found in the Drift terraces, and were made 

 by the deposit of the proper river sands where the current of these 

 streams met the back-water of the Ohio, at the time when the waters of 

 the latter were, probably eighty or one hundred feet higher than now. 

 In the Drift gravel in the Ohio and Muskingum terraces we find a great 



