76 GEOLOGY OF ILLINOIS. 



About a mile a little south of west from McLean sboro, at Mr. James 

 McGillet's place, sandstone is quarried to supply the demand for 

 building stone in this vicinity. The stone is of a good quality, very 

 evenly bedded, and can be quarried in slabs of any desirable size, and 

 varying in thickness from two or three inches to two feet. The bed is 

 from five to six feet thick at this quarry, and it affords most of the 

 building stone used in McLeansboro and the adjoining neighborhood. 

 The rock dresses easily and hardens on exposure, and can be cheaply 

 cut for window caps and sills, ashlars, etc. The sandstone is underlaid 

 at the quarry by about three feet of shale which farther down the 

 branch thickens to ten or twelve feet, when the banks of the stream 

 become alluvial and no further outcrop is seen for some distance. 

 Above the quarry rock there is a partial outcrop of ten to fifteen feet 

 of sandy shale, with a few thin layers of sandstone intercalated therein, 

 from two to eight inches thick. 



At Mr. Rice's place, about a mile north of McGilley's quarry, there 

 is a band of hard argillaceous limestone from a foot to eighteen inches 

 in thickness, outcropping at_a considerable higher level than the sand- 

 stone at McGilley's. The limestone is overlaid by fire-clay and a thin 

 seam of coal, which has been worked in a small way by stripping at 

 several places hereabouts. The limestone has been burned for lime, but 

 is evidently too impure to slack freely, and moreover, the bed is too thin 

 to be profitably quarried for any purpose. It contains no fossils. On 

 the north side of the ridge about a quarter of a mile from Rice's, there 

 is another outcrop of the limestone where lime has been burned, and 

 here it is overlaid by a black shale containing concretions of black 

 limestone or septaria. 



At Mr. Barnet's place, on Hog prairie, the coal overlaying the lime- 

 stone is from eight to twelve inches thick, with from one to two feet of 

 fire clay between. In the early settlement of the country this coal was 

 worked by stripping to supply the neighboring blacksmiths, but since 

 the opening of the heavy beds in Saline county the work here has been 

 abandoned. This limestone is probably somewhere from thirty to forty 

 feet above the highest beds seen at McGilley's quarry, and the follow- 

 ing section will show the general relation of the strata seen between Hog 

 prairie and McLeansboro: 



Ft. In. 



Yellow ferruginous shale _ 10 



Black, or dark-blue bituminous shale -2 to 3 



Coal § to 1 



Fire-clay 1 to 2 



Limestone lto 1 6 



Space unexposed, estimated at 30 to 40 



Shale and thin bedded sandstone 10 to 1-2 



Evenly bedded sandstone at ilcGilley 'a 5 



Sandy shales 8 to 10 



