BUILDING STONES. 87 



compact hard and flinty rock; from yellow to very dark brown in color, 

 and from" one to twenty feet thick. Such rocks are found everywhere 

 throughout the East Texas region, and are often used for foundations and 

 chimneys. They occur plentifully in the bluffs of the Angelina at the 

 mouth of Walker Creek, and on the Neches River west of Gent, in the 

 shape of a soft friable sandstone. Sometimes it is associated with peb- 

 bles of iron ore. Two miles east of the Neches, on the Gent road, is seen 

 a very hard dark brown sandstone about four feet thick, capping a small 

 knoll. Similar deposits are of very frequent occurrence on the slopes of the 

 iron-bearing hills and ridges. Four miles north of Jefferson it is seen in 

 some places twenty feet thick, and generally of a yery friable nature. The 

 State Penitentiary at Rusk is built of a soft yellow sandstone, containing 

 specks of altered glauconite and a few casts of fossils. This was obtained from 

 a bed ten feet thick and immediately underlying the main iron-bearing green- 

 sand bed. It is soft and easily cut with a saw. A rock very similar to this is 

 found capping Cook's Mountain, three miles west of Crockett, in Houston 

 County. It is a friable sandstone, and composed of siliceous sand with specks 

 of glauconite and mica, is of a yellow color, contains many fossil casts in places, 

 and shows considerable cross-bedding. The so-called "mountain" rises a lit- 

 tle over one hundred feet above Crockett, is 600 yards long from northwest 

 to southeast, and from 50 to 100 yards wide. The greensand bed which 

 directly underlies the brown laminated iron ore stratum has often become 

 yellow and hardened to a sufficient degree to be utilized as a building stone. 

 In the region where it occurs it is very extensively used for fireplaces and 

 such small structures. It is of a chalky or waxy consistency, dense and 

 compact in structure, and easily shaped into the desired form by an ax or 

 saw. On this ease with which it can be cut, and also a certain toughness 

 which it preserves in spite of its softness, depends its universal use wherever 

 it can be found. It is locally known as " yellow rock," "yellow sandstone," 

 or "gumstone." The greensand bed varies from thirty to forty feet thick, 

 but it is only in parts of it that the hardening process has gone on to a suffi- 

 cient extent to make it available for building purposes. These indurated 

 places vary from one to ten feet thick. Sometimes the greensand has be- 

 come hardened without losing its green color, and in such cases we have a 

 green rock of very similar nature to the yellow one just described. Such a 

 material is found in Doyle's Gap and on the slope of the Mount Selman iron 

 range, in Cherokee County. The glauconite in this green rock is generally 

 mixed with a large amount of clay of the same color, and in some places the 

 clay almost entirely replaces that mineral. This presence of clay probaoly 

 accounts for the hardening of the bed, as it has acted as a cement in indur- 



