34 



NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



ville. The electric railway from Syracuse to Jamesville has a 

 cutting through one of these delta fragments, as shown in 

 plate 26. 



The powerful floods of the falling waters excavated the earlier 

 and higher delta deposits and rolled the huge boulders as well as 

 the finer detritus to lower levels, northward, in the narrow Butter- 

 nut valley. For a stretch of some 2 miles north from the mouth 

 of the Railroad channel the valley seems to have been once filler! 

 to the width of a mile and to the depth of at least 100 feet near 

 the head of the deposit. The most extensive remnant at the higher 

 level is traversed by the east and west road leading to High Bridge. 

 Lower fragments occur both sides of the valley as far as DeWitt; 

 and a broad plain a mile northeast of DeWitt and alongside the 

 Erie canal and its wide waters, with elevation of 440 feet, consists 

 of coarse material and boulders up to 2 feet in diameter. 



After the long weathering and soil production these coarse 

 limestone deltas superficially resemble bouldery moraine; but 

 dissection shows the water-worn and water-laid character of the 

 deposit and the almost exclusively limestone composition. 



The final erosion of the delta was by the lowest flow of the 

 glacial waters and the more recent work of Butternut creek, and 

 the material has been swept east and north to fill the low ground 

 of the Oneida lake depression and Cicero swamp. 



On this meridian, between the Onondaga and Butternut valleys, 

 are found, certainly one and probably two more passes for glacial 

 waters. Leading eastward from Syracuse to East Syracuse, and 

 utilized by the several transportation lines going east, is a broad 

 conspicuous channel, already described [see title 28] as the Syracuse 

 channel. It is ^ mile wide, and with present altitude as given by 

 the New York Central Railroad levels of 415 feet. As it has been 

 filled to some extent by accumulation of marl and peat its effective 

 level was somewhat under the above figure. 



North of Syracuse is a low, shallow valley, occupied by Ley 

 creek, which connects the Onondaga valley with the low Oneida 

 basin on the east by a divide near East Syracuse somewhat over 

 400 feet elevation, and toward Cicero swamp and Oneida lake by 

 passes under 400 feet. When the ice front was in the neighbor- 

 hood of Liverpool and the ice border drainage occupied the low 

 pass by Jordan, Memphis, Warner and Amboy, the flow undoubt- 

 edly continued east by the depression of the present Onondaga 

 lake and the Ley creek valley. 



