ECONOMICAL GEOLOGY. 
255 
There are other beds or veins of iron ore on the east side of Crowder’s 
Mountain, one of which, about a mile distant, a friend reports having 
traced two miles by its outcrops ; but no openings have been made here. 
There are three notable ore-beds on the western division of this part 
of the range, on the lands known as the “ High Shoals.” They are the 
Ferguson , the Fllison and the Costner ore banks. The first is the most 
southerly. It is a granular magnetic ore, with much iron pyrites, which 
has been superficially changed to limonite. This bed has been long 
worked, but the sulphur has always lowered, more or less, the quality of 
the iron made from it. The Ellison ore bank is about a mile northeasterly 
on the range. This has been worked for a great while, and has furnished 
an immense amount of ore. Its quality is very high. 
The heavy iron castings for the Rolling Mills at High Shoals were 
made from the furnace hearth, and, after seven years use, show scarcely a 
sign of wear ; and car wheels made of this iron were very extensively 
used during the late war, and were found by all the railroads which used 
them, “equal to the best manufactured from the Salisbury iron,” as testi- 
fied by the Superintendents and other officers of the most important lines, 
on some of which “as many as 2,000 car wheels, made principallv from 
this iron, were in use ” at onetime. “In castings where strength and 
durability are specially required,” it is pronounced by several of those 
officers most familiar with it, as “ having no superior.” This ore is a slaty 
granular magnetite, with much hematite, and generally has a very red 
streak. The slate contains actinolite, as well as some chlorite and talc. The 
bed has the strike of the enclosing slates, N. 20° E., and a steep westerly 
dip, nearly vertical, and a thickness of twelve to eighteen feet; it has 
been worked to a depth of more than 100 feet, and at this level is eighteen 
feet thick. 
The Costner Ore Bank is about three miles in a northerly course, on 
the same line, and one mile east of the furnace (“Long Creek”). This 
has more of the seeming of a vein, from its associations and general 
character. The rock is granitic and syenytic, and one wall is a bed of 
crystalline limestone, twelve feet thick. The ore is a very dense, metallic 
and subcrystalline magnetite, and is very free from impurities, as will- 
be seen from the analysis below ; and the bar iron made from it is very 
tough and strong. The vein is ten to twelve feet thick; and it is reported 
by the miners who last penetrated it, at a depth of over 100 feet, to be 
above twenty feet thick. 
There are two other important ore beds on this tract, — “ High Shoals,” 
•but they do not belong to the regular range of ore beds which we have 
been considering, being out of their line to the west, and of a verv dif- 
