172 CLAYS AND CLAY INDUSTRY. 



gravel deposits are locally 135 feet thick, the great mass. of the 

 clay is unavailable. 



At present the clay along Cheesequake creek is being dug only 

 by Leonard Furman and H. C. Perrine & Son. The former mines 

 his clay by shafts and drifts, the latter firm, controlling several 

 banks, works in open pits. All in all, the stoneware bed is 

 worked much less than was the case twenty-five years ago. 



SAND BED, NO. 3. 



Underlying the Amboy stoneware clay and overlying the fire 

 clays, which are dug at Sayreville and Burt Creek (to be de- 

 scribed below) , there is a thick deposit of quartz sand. The lower 

 portion of the bed is exposed in most of the excavations made to 

 reach the underlying fire clay, while the upper part has been pene- 

 trated by a few borings made in the bottom of the overlying stone- 

 ware-clay beds. The entire bed is nowhere exposed in a contin- 

 uous section. 



In general the material is a loose, clean, quartz sand, often 

 coarse and occasionally even approximating fine gravel. Much 

 of it is sharp and angular and of value for fire, foundry, and build- 

 ing sand. The sand pits of Sayre & Fisher, Edward Furman, 

 William Albert, Whitehead Brothers and J. R. Crossman, at 

 Sayreville and Burt Creek, are located in this bed, which under- 

 lies the high ground south of the Raritan river and northwest of 

 the Camden & Amboy Rwy., between Sayreville and South Am- 

 boy. A heavy bed of yellow gravel (Pensauken) forms the tops 

 of the hills, but the sand underlies the gravel at an elevation of 

 about 90 feet. Locally, however, it contains some thin lenses of 

 clay, such as are seen in the upper part of Whitehead's bank (69), 

 west of Burt Creek. The sandy clays formerly dug along the 

 shore near George street, South Amboy, seem also to belong here, 

 as they are too' low for the Amboy stoneware clay. 



As already noted in connection with the stoneware clay, the 

 upper part of this sand member is, in some pits, a black, lignitic 

 sand or sandy clay. This was reported to> be the case at Perrine's 

 poorhouse bank (81), one of the shafts at the old Ernst property 



