CONWAY COUNTY, 61 
at the base of the ridge immediately south of the town, but geo- 
logically it is about 200 feet lower. The character, color, and plas- 
ticity of the clay are the same as those of the clay west of the public 
schoolhouse. This plant has now gone out of business. 
One mile northeast of Morrillton, at a place where the road runs 
northward past Thomas D. Hawkins's house, a 2-foot bed of red 
clay, with little sand, is cut through by the road. Where the road 
crosses the point of the ridge that rises toward the east from the 
northeast edge of the town there is a similar red clay. 
Red clay like that at the localities described above is to be found 
on nearly all of the slight elevations in the valley and near Mor- 
rillton. The bed does not exceed a very few feet in thickness at 
any place. It is derived from the bed of black gritty shale that 
underlies this valley and is all of about the same color, has the 
same amount of sand, and contains much iron in the form of buck- 
shot nodules. It makes a very good quality of brick so far as hard- 
ness and durability are concerned, though its color is somewhat 
injured for special uses by the black iron blotches. 
sh 
Fig. 6.— Section cast of Morrillton. cl, Clay; sh, shale; ss, sandstone. 
This clay is good for common bricks or common tiles, but would 
not be available for sewer tiles, nor can it be used for any other 
than common bricks. 
The shale that makes up the valley is apparently about the same 
throughout in thickness, color, hardness, and percentage of sand, 
and yields a pretty uniform residuary clay. The bed of shale is 
from 550 to 600 feet thick, and under the town of Morrillton and 
east of it dips south, but turns over the nose of the anticline at 
the northeast corner of the town and dips north. A north-south 
section 1 mile east of Morrillton, from the sandstone jn the south 
side of the anticlinal nose to the second ridge south of Morrillton, 
is shown in fig. 6. 
This section represents the thickness of the rocks about 1 mile 
east of Morrillton, and shows how the clay occurs on the shale in 
Morrillton. Where the section is taken the clay is mostly eroded 
away at the north side. At present no clay industries are reported 
from Conway County. 
