THE LOWER COAL MEASURES. 205 
below the Upper Freeport coal at this point, but as the latter seam rises 
out of its basin along the line of .the railroad to the southeastward the 
Roger coal comes to day, and is in good condition. It isa very bright and 
excellent appearing coal, 3 feet or more in thickness. It has been tried 
for gas in Cleveland and Ravenna with at least moderate approval. 
The coke made from it was not the strongest. The coal was last opened 
by Mr. Hutchins, of the Salineville Coal Company. 
A shaft has lately been sunk to the Roger coal by the Columbiana 
Coal Company near its Strip Vein mine, above Salineville, but the 
thickness of the seam is understood to be below 30 inches, and this fact 
will forbid its being worked under existing conditions. The quality of 
the seam wherever reached about Salineville is fair. 
On the west side of the county, along the line of the Cleveland 
and Pittsburgh Railroad, there are several small mines in the Upper 
Freeport coal. They find their main office in furnishing a local supply 
to the neighborhoods around them. 
The seam is well shown at Wm. Somerville’s mine near Rochester, 
where it has long been worked in the way already described. It is 
here unsteady in thickness, suffering always when reduced from the 
intrusion of the overlying Mahoning sandstone. Where normal and 
undisturbed it affords the same section as at Salineville, viz., 4 feet of 
coal, 2 inches of slate parting, and 12 to 16 inches of bottom coal. 
The character of the coal is also the same as has been already described. 
For household use it cannot compete on equal terms with the Kittan- 
ning coals that lie 100 feet or more below it. | 
The same seam is also mined at Moultrie, a few miles further north, 
where the same general conditions occur. 
In the southeastern corner of the county, along the river front, in 
Liverpool and Yellow Creek townships, a good deal of coal is mined in 
a small way. The seams that contribute to this supply are mainly the 
Lower and Middle Kittanning and the Lower Freeport seams, or New- 
berry’s Nos. 3, 4 and 5 of the Ohio Valley series. 
The Lower Kittanning horizon is by far the best known and most 
developed of the entire series, not, however, on account of its coal, 
which is very impure, but on account of the great bed of fire-clay that 
the coal directly covers, and which is the basis of a business of great 
volume and importance throughout this part of the Ohio Valley. 
