132 GEOLOGY OF NORTH CAROLINA. 
for some time, it was abandoned, and altogether neglected till 
within four or five years past, when it was opened anew, and the 
coal is now used in preference to charcoal, in the black-smiths' 
shops in the neighbourhood of the mine. Two or three years 
since a bed of Anthracite coal was discovered on the lands of 
Messrs. Farish and Clegg, four miles lower down the river, and 
within the present year, another has been opened on the lands of 
George Wilcox, about eight miles above. This last, at the point 
where it was discovered, is so highly charged with iron pyrites 
as to be unfit to be employed in working iron, but a little explo- 
ration might bring to light coal of a better quality. At the other 
bed it appears to be good. Through nearly the whole of the 
northern side of this sandstone formation, in the counties of 
Chatham, Moore, and Montgomery, a distance of 50 miles, the 
black shales which appear at the surface render it probable that 
coal may be discovered, and although in a thinly settled country, 
that is covered with forests, and remote from water carriage it 
can have no immediate commercial value, it is pleasant to know 
that we have resources to which we may turn, when those upon 
which we have hitherto depended shall fail. 
A mineral spring that has some reputation, rises from the stra- 
ta we are describing in Moore. It is a pretty strong chalybeate. 
Jackson's, a branch of Downing creek, rises in the sand-hills, 
but has removed the sand so as to bring the subjacent rock to 
view, for some distance along its bed, and it is from a crevice in 
a body of trap rocks that the water flows. 
The sandstone is quarried and used in building, for which it is 
in some places well adapted, grindstones of a tolerable quality 
are cut from it in Montgomery, Richmond, and Anson ; and in 
the northern part of Moore, instead of the common fine sand, being 
composed of quartz pebbles, of considerable size, cemented in 
in the usual way, it is a valuable material for mill-stones, espe- 
cially such as are to be employed in grinding corn. 
This formation has been represented as a continuation of that 
which passes through Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Mid- 
dle States. The only evidence we have of this relationship or 
identity, is furnished by a similarity of composition ; similar sand- 
stones, are associated in the same way, with similar masses of 
trap. There are however points of difference. Supposing the 
formation to be parts of the same, which if not continuous, was 
throughout the result of the same causes ; the irregularities of 
surface, the relative proportion of the trap, and the quantity of 
the associated minerals, appear to diminish with some degree of 
regularity, from its northern to its southern extremity. In New- 
England the trap forms long ranges of mountains, some of which 
are from seven or eight hundred to more than a thousand feet in 
height ; the most elevated of the trap ridges in New Jersey are not 
more than 400 feet, but they are many miles in length ; in North Caro- 
lina they are greatly reduced in both extent and elevation. Min- 
