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WASHINGTON COUNTY. A457 
17,280 acres, and a total in the two valleys within the limits of Wash- 
ington county of 32,640 acres. The largest deposits of Limestone strata 
are perhaps those found along Wolf Creek, but they are so low in the 
valley—indeed, often in the bed of the stream—that they produce little 
fertilizing effect. In Adams, Salem, and Liberty townships there are 
valuable deposits of highly soluble limestone, which are of the utmost 
agricultural importance, and give to many farms a rich and almost self- 
perpetuating soil. Such limestones are not altogether wanting in sev- 
eral other townships, but are most abundant in the townships named. 
The smoothest lands in the county, and those most attractive to the eye, 
excepting the more immediate river valleys, are found on the slope 
drained by the branches of Wolf Creek, in the townships of Barlow, 
Watertown, Palmer, etc. They are not, perhaps, the richest, for there is 
a deficiency in limestone; but they lie beautifully, and in their gentle 
undulations and gradual slopes are in marked contrast with the abrupt 
hills socommon in other parts of the county. Taken as a whole, the 
soil of Washington county is in quality above the average of that of the 
counties of southern Ohio. Even its most rough and forbidding hills 
have, by the frugal and industrious German population, been rendered 
productive and attractive. 
General Geological Features.—'The county lies wholly within the Coal 
Measures, and in the upper portion of the series. There are no other 
geological formations represented within the county, if we except the 
surface materials which constitute the Drift terraces of the Muskingum 
and Ohio valleys, which are of Quaternary age. There is in Barlow, on 
the northern slope of the Wolf Creek waters, the probable evidence of 
an ancient lake bed, which is also, doubtless, Quaternary in age. The 
Drift terraces constitute a uniform series of ancient gravel banks and 
sand bars, formed at a time when the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers were 
at a far higher stage than now. The materials of these terraces were 
brought from the north, from areas once covered by large deposits of 
sand, gravel, bowlders, etc. Duck Creek and Little Muskingum are not 
sufficiently far north to reach these Drift areas, and, consequently, no true 
Drift terraces are found upon them. On the Little Muskingum and 
Duck Creek I have noticed some terraced banks, but they show none of 
the extra-limital materials found in the Drift terraces, and were made 
by the deposit of the proper river sands where the current of these 
_ streams met the back-water of the Ohio, at the time when the waters of 
the latter were probably eighty or one hundred feet higher than now. 
In the Drift gravel in the Ohio and Muskingum terraces we find a great 
