“ASHLAND COUNTY. | 521 
the unstratified bowlder clay, often disclosed in sinking wells, and occa- 
sionally rising in ridges above the water-plain. The water in Savannah 
Lake is sixty feet above the surface of Jerome Fork at Ashland, and fifty 
feet below the top of the drift hills in the immediate neighborhood. 
The summit of the divide, not far from the lake, is one hundred and ten 
feet above it. The surface in the old channel, one-half mile north, 1s 
now on the same level as the water of the lake. On the east side of the 
lake—partly by the filling up of the channel, partly by the subsidence 
of the lake—it is fifteen feet above the latter, and is separated from it by 
a narrow sand ridge. 
North of the divide, the surface is covered with Drift, which conceals 
the geological structure. The soil is a stiff, tenacious clay, with here 
and there granitic bowlders, more abundant as the crest of the divide is 
reached, few fragments of rocks, and but little gravel. These broad 
stretches of level clay land, from the general level and imperfect drain- 
age, have ceased to produce crops of winter wheat, now that the cavities 
produced by the roots of the original forest have become obliterated, and 
these channels of underground drainage obstructed. The principal 
crops are grass, corn, and oats. The forest is greatly diversitied—in 
places almost entirely beech and maple, in others oak; and again, in 
others, a mixed forest, containing all the trees found in Northern Ohio. 
The two small streams which pass diagonally through Orange town- 
ship, have broad water-plains, and occupy old valleys, filled to an un- 
known depth with the Drift. The most easterly of these channels ex- 
tends northward, and connecting with a stream in the east part of Mont- 
gomery township, spreads out into a wide, swampy valley, which shows 
plainly an old pre-glacial channel. North of Orange village the valley 
of the stream is covered with stratified sand and coarse gravel, all modi- 
fied Drift, in which the stream is constantly changing its channel, flow- 
ing from six to eight feet below the level of the old water-plain. As it 
encroaches upon the banks it uncovers logs of large size on the level of 
the stream, which mark the divide between an old fallen forest and a 
soil-bed, now covered with from six to eight feet of modified Drift. Some 
twenty to thirty rods from the stream, and near the base of the low hills 
which border the valley, is a shallow well, which has flowed gas in mod- 
erate quantities for a long time, and which has been regarded as an indi- 
cation of productive oil strata below. - There is but little doubt that 
this gas has its source in the slow decomposition of the vegetable matter 
of this buried forest. In Ruggles township, the entire surface is covered 
with Drift, except on the borders and beds of the recent streams where 
erosion has carried it away. In the broad valley, west of Ruggles Centre, 
