112 THE CLAYS OF ARKANSAS. 
HOT SPRING COUNTY. 
GENERAL GEOLOGY. 
The Tertiary border enters Hot Spring County from the northeast, 
in Saline Township, and crossing the Hot Spring Railroad a mile 
south of Butterfield and Ouachita River at Rockport, passes into 
Clark County a few miles above the mouth of Bayou de Roche. To 
the south and east of this line lie the nearly horizontal Tertiary beds, 
while to the north and west the county is mountainous and the 
Paleozoic rocks are much folded, broken, and eroded. Though it is 
not impossible that pottery clays may be found among the disinte- 
grated shales of the hilly regions, the Tertiary is eminently the region 
of pottery clays, not only in Hot Spring County, but in the whole 
State of Arkansas. 
The Tertiary formations have been denuded in Hot Spring County, 
as elsewhere, so that the uppermost beds, being deeply scored by 
gullies, ravines, and valleys, are more or less fragmentary. Where 
the pottery clay beds belong with this uppermost group they have 
been exposed in the sides of the hills, but their margins have been 
covered and concealed by the less soluble and less portable remains 
of the overlying beds and by waterworn materials of Pleistocene age. 
The structure of the region is thus obscured in spite of its great sim- 
plicity, and for this reason the pottery clays have been found only 
where they happen to be uncovered by some natural process, as in the 
channel of a stream, or artificially along roadsides or in wells. 
CLAY DEPOSITS. 
PERL A SWITCH CLAYS. 
The only place at which the Tertiary pottery clays are known to 
have been worked in Hot Spring County is at Perla switch, about 2 
miles east of Malvern station on the St. Louis, Iron Mountain and 
Southern Railway. At this place Messrs. O. C. Atchison & Co. 
manufacture the ordinary kinds of common pottery ware, such as 
churns, jars, crocks, jugs, fruit jars, sewer pipes, flue linings, and 
fire bricks. The clay is obtained from a bank on the west side of a 
small stream in the NE. \ SE. \ sec. 24, T. 4 S., R. 17 W. 
The section on page 113 shows the relation of the pottery clays of i 
Atchison's pit to the hill on the west and south. 
The clays are covered by 3 to 5 feet of gravelly, sandy soil, the 
pebbles of which are principally of quartz and novaculite. 
The upper part of the clay bed has occasional pockets of pebbles, 
formed in cavities made by the decay of roots and stumps, the upper 
gravel having fallen into these openings. 
