HAMILTON COUNTY. 79 



feet of sandstone and two feet of blue shale. Mr. John Hall, in digging 

 a well on Knight's prairie, struck coal at the depth of seventeen feet. 

 Earthy limestone one foor, thick exposed at S. Lane's, also at Platt 

 Stephens' on sec. 16, T. 5, R. 7, where it is exposed in the bed of a 

 branch overlaid by ten feet of silicious shale. A thin coal is found on 

 sections 14 and 23, T. 5, E. 7. " 



These isolated sections give the general character of the outcrops to 

 be seen iu this county, but they afford no data on which to construct a 

 connected section of the several beds that outcrop within its borders. 

 It is probable the total thickness of the strata that appear in natural 

 outcrops within the county do not exceed one hundred and fifty to two 

 hundred feet, and include no important limestones, and no coal seams 

 above fifteen to eighteen inches in thickness except in the north-west 

 corner of the county, where coals Nos. 10 or 11 may perhaps be found 

 from two to two and a half feet thick. 



Economical Geology. 



Building Stone. — Sandstone of a fair quality for building purposes 

 may be obtained at several places in this county, and the quarry at 

 McGilley's, one mile south-west of McLeansboro, furnishes a good 

 material for flagging and for cut stone, as well as foundation walls, etc. 

 This quarry furnishes most of the stone used at McLeansboro and in 

 the adjoining neighborhood. A similar sandstone is found outcropping 

 on a branch about three miles north-west of McLeansboro, a tributary 

 of the Skillet Fork, and several quarries have been opened in the bluffs 

 of the stream. In the southern part of the county the supply of good 

 stone is not abundant, but the bed of micaceous sandstone near 'Squire 

 Twiggs' place, three n.iles west of Eectorsville station, affords a soft 

 rock in thin beds that is used for walling wells, for foundations, etc. 

 The hard chocolate-colored micaceous sandstone at Hood's old mill, on 

 the North Fork, near the south line of the county, affords a very dura- 

 ble stone, but is too thin bedded for heavy masonry. The only bed of 

 limestone seen in the county is too thin to be of. any practical value for 

 building purposes, and is unevenly bedded and nodular in structure. 



Coal. — The coal seams appearing above the surface in this county are 

 mostly too thin to be worked systematically, and no coal is mined in the 

 county at the present time except by stripping. The coal at Dr. 

 TVilkie's, just over the line in Jefferson county, attains locally a thick- 

 ness of about two feet and a half, and if that thickness should prove 

 persistent it might be worked to advantage in the usual way by a tunnel 

 or a shallow shaft. This seam probably underlays the north-west 

 corner of Hamilton county, and would be found at a depth of fifty 



