584 GEOLOGY OF OHIO. 



parting from a lower bench of four inches. The lowest bench found at 

 Mr. Mehl's bank was not noticed here. The Jones seam of coal at Clar- 

 ington is about twenty-five feet above the top of the shaft sunk to reach 

 the Wheeling seam of coal. The shaft is now filled with water, and I 

 could learn little of the strata through which it passed. In the debris 

 around the shaft I saw fragments of cement limestone. It was re- 

 ported th 1 1 this cement limestone came from about fifty feet below the 

 top of the shaft, or about seventy-five feet below the coal. This is about 

 the pi .ce of the cement stone, with reference to the Woodsfield seam of 

 coal. Is the Woodsfield, or the Jacob Weekly (of Adams township), seam 

 of coal the same as the upper Bellair and upper Barnesville seam ? I 

 have so given it in the grouping on the map, not as a settled fact, but as 

 the more probable determination. It is very difficult to carry the exact 

 place of a seam of coal through long ridges and highlands, such as hem 

 in the Sunfish valley on the north and west. The dip is unknown both 

 in rate and direction, and the seams of coal are often subject to very 

 great changes in thickness and quality. 



If the Clarington coal seam, twenty-five feet above the shaft, is the 

 upper Barnesville seam, then the shaft, eighty feet deep, is deep enough 

 to reach the Wheeling seam ; at least, the seam could not be far below, 

 for the greatest interval I have found between the two seams is one hun- 

 dred and five feet. The shaft should certainly have been sunk a few feet 

 lower before abandonment, or a trial boring should have been made. If the 

 seam above the shaft is not the upper Barnesville, or upper Bellair, seam, 

 it must be the one found in Belmont county some ninety feet higher — 

 the first seam below the tunnel at Barnesville — and in that case the shaft, 

 or boring, must be sunk ninety feet deeper to reach the Wheeling seam. 

 But the shaft is deep enough to have passed through the upper Barnes- 

 ville seam, but nothing was seen of this, so far as I could hear. The 

 probability is, I think, in favor of regarding the coal above the shaft as 

 the upper Barnesville seam, which is the Cumberland seam of Guernsey, 

 Noble, and Washington counties. If a few feet had been bored below the 

 bottom of the shaft without finding the Wheeling seam, we might have 

 serious doubts in regard to finding it at all. At Somerton, in Belmont 

 county, its horizon was passed through in boring, and no coal was found. 

 In several counties between Meigs and Belmont it is subject to great 

 changes, and it often disappears altogether. There are certain areas 

 where it is continuous and uniform, where a shaft might be sunk to it, 

 with a strong antecedent probability of finding the seam in good develop- 

 ment ; but as a rule it is not safe to sink a shaft to find this or any other 

 seam of coal in Ohio, without first making a trial boring. 



