Luther — Economic Geology of Onondaga County. 



251 



The state ditch across the peninsula in the southwestern part of the town 

 of Lysander, formed by the loop of the Seneca river near Jack's Ritfs, w as 

 excavated through a bed of quite hard olive and green shales and thin lime- 

 stones, reaching the top of the Red shales. An exposure of banded green 

 and red shales occurs on the east side of Onondaga lake, not far from the cor- 

 poration line of Syracuse, and the redder shales may be seen farther north 

 toward Liverpool. Neither salt nor gypsum is found in any considerable 

 quantity in the Red shales. Their only economic value lies in the fact that 

 they supply an inexhaustible quantity of good material for the manufacture 

 of brick. For this purpose the shale is dried and screened to remove any 

 fragments of limestone or sandstone, then pulverized, after which it is brought 

 to the proper consistency by the addition of water and pressed into the form 

 of bricks. The 1 tricks are dried and baked in immense conical kilns till 

 thoroughly hardened. 



The Onondaga Vitrified Brick Co. manufacture 10,000,000 building 

 bricks annually. The Central City Brick Co. produced, in 1895, at their new- 

 plant at Kirkville, 1,500,000 ornamental pressed brick and expect the annual 

 output to be many times that number hereafter. 



At the top of the Red shales, thin layers of drab limestones, some of them 

 cellular, and all cracked and seamed and containing the hopper shaped forms 

 which indicate the former presence of salt crystals, make up a large part 

 of the rock strata, the remainder being composed of soft, clayey, olive, or 

 harder, bluish and drab gypsiferous shales. Some of the olive layers show 

 even more plainly than the limestone, that salt in seams and veins and crystals 

 Was once abundant in these rocks, and the disturbed condition of the strata 

 makes the supposition not unreasonable that one or more layers of rock salt 

 have been removed by dissolution. The great deposits of rock salt in the 

 western and central New York salt fields are all in this horizon, as is the bed 

 reached in the wells of the Solvay Process Co. at Tully, which is. beyond 

 doubt, the source whence has been derived the enormous quantity of salt held 

 in solution in the brines of the Onondaga lake basin, from w hich there has 

 been manufactured without material diminution of the strength of the brine, 

 ten million tons of salt, equal to a bed of rock salt ten feet thick, covering 

 810 acres. 



Historical Epitome of the /Salt Industry. The first salt manufactured 

 from the Onondaga Salt springs was on the sixteenth day of August, 1653, 

 by Father LeMoyne, a Jesuit missionary, who says : " We tasted the water of 

 a spring, which the Indians were afraid to drink, saying it was inhabited by 



