MAHONING COUNTY. 7193 
wood. The laminated structure, visible in most coals, and especially 
conspicuous in this, seems due to alternations of greater and less quanti- 
ties of water in the coal marshes. This would give somewhat different 
character to the sheets of carbonaceous matter which accumulated in the — 
different intervals. This banding has perhaps been subsequently much 
increased by great vertical pressure, which has reduced the zones, once 
an inch or two in thickness, to mere sheets. In confirmation of this 
view, it may be said said that all our open-burning bituminous coals— 
the Brier Hill, the Brazil, and the Hocking Valley furnace coals—show 
a distinctly laminated structure, and hackly fracture; while the more 
bituminous varieties of Coal No. 1, the Mineral Ridge, and Massillon 
coals show broader, smoother, and more lustrous surface of fracture, and 
the highly caking coals exhibit this feature in a still higher degrce. 
The stratum immediately ovetlying Coal No. 1. is gray or black shale, 
usually the latter. Above the shale is sandstone; sometimes in a single 
bed of great thickness; sometimes divided, which I have called the Mas- 
sillon sandstone. It is seen in many places on the sides of the Mahoning 
Valley, where it furnishes most of the building stone used. Its greatest 
known development is at the Foster shaft, where if has a thickness 
of one hundred and forty-six feet. At Wick and Wells’ shaft, on the 
east line of Austintown, it is also very thick, one hundred and twenty 
feet ; but its local and irregular nature is well shown by its variableness 
in the vicinity of these mines; for example, at the Kyle shaft, about a 
mile east of the Foster, it is said to be only eleven feet thick, and at 
Andrews & Co’s shaft, less than a mile south-east from this point, it has . 
again thickened up to eighty fect. In the Mineral Ridge belt the sand- 
stone is generally from fifteen to fifty feet thick, and in the most south- 
erly mine of this belt, the Harroff Slope, it is said to be wanting. In 
the western counties of Pennsylvania this rock becomes a Conglomerate 
that has been often mistaken for the true Conglomerate, which lies be- 
low the coal. The color of the Massillon sandstone is generally yellow- 
ish brown, but it is often either generally tinged or mottled with pink. 
It is rather coarse-grained, but frequently supplies a very handsome and 
durable building stone, as is shown in the new court-house at Youngs- 
town. 
Coan INoy2: 
Where the Massillon sandstone has not cut out other strata, the inter- 
val of two hundred feet above Coal No. 1 consists of a number of alter- 
nations of gray and black shale and sandstone, in which a thin coal 
seam is frequently found from fifty to eighty feet above Coal No. 1. -This 
