u . NEW \ . botanical 0 k CARDEN New York State Museum Bulletin Published by The University of the State of New York No. 280 ALBANY, N. Y. February 1923 New York State Museum Charles C. Adams, Director GLACIAL GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS of the LOWER MOHAWK VALLEY A Survey of the Amsterdam, Fonda, Gloversville and Broadalbin Quadrangles BY Albert Perry Brigham Sc.D., L.H.D., LL.D. TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE Introduction 5 Earlier Studies 7 Physiography of the four Quad- rangles 8 The Ice Invasion of New York. . 12 Explanatory Considerations 15 Record of Striae 17 Discussion of the Glacial Striae. . 21 Striae beyond the borders of our area 23 The Interlobate Moraine 24 Perth-Broadalbin Till Plain.... 26 The Sacandaga Glacier 27 Drumlins 29 Drumloid and Linear Topography 32 Glaciated Rock Benches 35 The Limits of the Mohawk Glacial Lake 36 Proofs of Westward Movement.. 40 Depth of the Ice 41 Thickness of the Drift 46 Erratics 48 Minor Morainic Areas 49 Sand Plains 50 Glacial Lake Sacandaga 51 Lake Schoharie 54 Diversion of the Sacandaga River 55 Water-laid Drift Along the Mo- hawk River 57 Icebergs 66 Iroquois Waters in the Mohawk Valley 67 PAGE Glacial Recession and High- Level Waters in Mohawk Valley 72 Postglacial Changes 82 Geographic Conditions in the Lower Mohawk Valley 85 Sites and Trails of the Mohawk Indians 86 Early White Settlements 89 Battle Grounds 93 The Larger Centers of Popula- tion 95 Amsterdam 96 Fonda and Fultonville 99 Johnstown and Gloversville. . . 101 Broadalbin and Northville. . . . 103 Soils and Agriculture 105 Sundry Natural Resources.... 109 Early Roads 1 1 1 First Improved Roads 114 Fords, Ferries and Bridges.... 115 Transportation by Walter.... 116 The Railways 117 The Modern Roads 119 The Rise of Industries 121 Power Development and Trans- mission 123 Recent Changes in Rural Life. 125 Eras of Physical and Human Unfolding 126 Bibliography 129 Index Geologic Map (inside rear. cover) ALBANY THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK I929 M240r-Ae28-2000 THE UNIVERSITY OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK Regents of the University With years when terms expire 1934 Chester S. Lord M.A., LL.D., Chancellor - - Brooklyn 1936 Adelbert Moot LL.D., Vice Chancellor - - - Buffalo 1940 Walter Guest Kellogg B.A., LL.D. - - - Ogdensburg 1932 James Byrne B.A., LL.B., LL.D. New York 1931 Tiiomas J. Mangan M. A., LL.D. ----- Binghamton 1933 William J. Wallin M.A. ------- Yonkers 1935 William Bondy M.A., LL.B., Ph.D., D.C.L. - New York 1930 William P. Baker B.L., Litt. D. - - - - - Syracuse 1929 Robert W. Higbie M.A., LL.D. ----- Jamaica 1938 Roland B. Woodward B.A. Rochester 1937 Mrs Herbert Lee Pratt ------- New York 1939 Wm Leland Thompson B.A. Troy President of the University and Commissioner of Education Frank P. Graves Ph.D . Litt. D., L.H.D., LL.D. Deputy Commissioner and Counsel Ernest E. Cole LL.B., Pd.D. Assistant Commissioner for Higher and Professional Education James Sullivan M.A., Ph.D., LL.D. Assistant Commissioner for Secondary Education George M. Wiley M.A., Pd.D., LL.D. i Assistant Commissioner for Elementary Education J. Cayce Morrison M.A., Ph.D. Assistant Commissioner for Vocational and Extension Education Lewis A. Wilson D.Sc. Assistant Commissioner for Finance Alfred D. Simpson M.A., Ph.D. 1 Director of State Library James I. Wyer M.L.S., Pd.D. Director of Science and State Museum Charles C. Adams M.S., Ph.D., D.Sc. Directors of Divisions Administration, Lloyd L. Cheney B.A. Archives and History, Alexander C. Flick M.A., Litt. D., Ph.D., LL.D. Attendance, Charles L. Mosher Ph.M. Examinations and Inspections, Avery W. Skinner B.A., Pd.D. Health and Physical Education, Frederick R. Rogers M.A., Ph.D. Law, Irwin Esmond Ph.B., LL.B. Library Extension, Frank L. Tolman Ph.B., Pd.D. Motion Picture, James Wingate M.A. School Buildings and Grounds, Frank H. Wood M.A. Teacher Training, Ned H. Dearborn M.A., Ph.D. Visual Instruction. Alfred W. Abrams Ph.B. Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2017 with funding from IMLS LG-70-15-0138-15 https://archive.org/details/newyorkstatemuse2801 newy New Y ork State Museum Bulletin Published by The University of the State of New York No. 280 ALBANY, N. Y. February 1929 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Charles C. Adams, Director GLACIAL GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS of the LOWER MOHAWK VALLEY A Survey of the Amsterdam, Fonda, Gloversville and Broadalbin Quadrangles BY Albert Perry Brigham Sc.D., L.H.D., LL.D. INTRODUCTION Our study covers about 900 square miles lying mainly in the lowet Mohawk valley. We include a piece of the southern Adirondacks, the lowland whose northern apex is at Northville and whose southern border is the Mohawk, and the hill country leading up to the heights of the Catskill plateau. Speaking in the language of physiography we have here a cross section of the Mohawk Province, at the northern end of that great plateau which reaches from eastern and central New York far into Alabama. The Hudson-Mohawk and Champlain depressions are the only low-level cuts across the Appalachian highlands within the United States. Hence we are here in a region of the utmost historical and economic significance. If we consult the earliest population maps of the United States, those of 1790 and later decades, we shall find a peninsula of settle- ment pushing westward along the Mohawk between two areas of upland wilderness. The pioneers of Kentucky and Tennessee first subdued soil west of the mountains and they were closely followed by the frontiersmen who went up the Mohawk. Here in succession came waves of settlement by Dutchmen, Palatines and British. Bleecker, Fonda, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Johnstown, Perth, Cork, Galway — such are some of the memorials which these early Americans have left in our region. [5] 6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Across our area runs what is, all in all, the greatest American trunk line of movement, for here were primitive trails, the batteaux of the Mohawk, and the six lines of railway track, the barge canal and one of the most thronged of American highways, while on the south border is the Cherry valley turnpike now come to rejuvena- tion after decades of quietude. Great industries have made well known the three cities of the region, carrying everywhere in America the names of Amsterdam, Johnstown and Gloversville. A most distinguished name, written in the annals of New York and the Nation, is Sir William Johnson. Fort Johnson, now the home of the Montgomery County Historical Society, Guy Park, now the property of the State, and the old manor house of Johnstown, are the visible memorials of a great colonial figure and his family. Here was the home of many stern patriots who joined Herkimer to protect their beloved valley at Oriskany and to insure victory on the Saratoga battleground, and here at Johnstown was fought the last of those 98 bloody encounters which the American Revolution saw in the Colony of New York. It is our part here to go back to times thousands of years before the white man or even the Iroquois saw the Mohawk valley, and see what the ice invasion accomplished here, and then to see in a brief survey how the mantle of drift and the related elements of the physical geography have affected the movements and works of man. EARLIER STUDIES Lardner Vanuxem, in studies made about 1840, gives the occur- rence of striae having a nearly east and west direction, in several places near Amsterdam, and includes a figure showing one of these gravings (’42, p. 244-45). The direction was W 8° N, quarry two and one-half miles northeast of Amsterdam, locality then known as Schelpintown. In his account of Montgomery county, Vanuxem briefly described that range of sandy hills extending across the northern part of our district by Gloversville and Broadalbin, which we shall describe as an interlobate moraine. Winds and waves seem to him to have been the forces of accumulation. He has further an interesting notice of the “Vlie,” recognizing the existence of a large lake, which we now know lay in front of the Sacandaga glacier. He further made note of blue clays in the Mohawk valley, covered with sand and rolled stones. James D. Dana (’63) early published a short paper which is of interest in the light of the fuller knowledge of today (’63, p. 243- 49). The essay had its origin in information given Dana by Rev. W. B. Dwight of striae near Cherry Valley, where, near together, are glacial markings of both east-west and north-south directions. Thus Vanuxem and more explicitly Dana suggest the existence of a Mohawk glacier, although there is no sign that they discovered that its movement was up rather than down the valley. Dana then raises the interesting question of the relative age of the two sets of striae at Cherry Valley. If the north-south scratches were older, he thinks they were made by “a great continental glacier spreading south- ward from the remote north,” of which the Mohawk glacier was a final portion that became partly outlined and independent only in the later part of the glacial epoch. The next advance in glacial studies of this region was made by Chamberlin (’82, p. 360-365). This observer here announces the view that there was a preglacial divide at Little Falls, and that the movement in the valley up to that point and even farther on the plateau rising on the south was from east to west. The present writer (’98, p. 183-210) presented in 1898 an outline of the physiographic development of the valley, gave further evidence that the movement was from east to west, and described the various bodies of water-laid drift which occur along the river from Rome to Schenectady. m 8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Field studies of the four quadrangles here included were carried on by the writer at various times from 1906 to 1910. Having been long interrupted by other demands, they are here resumed and brought to a conclusion. A preliminary report setting forth main features, appears in the Fourth Report of the Director of the New York State Museum for 1907, p. 21-31. A further report of progress is found in the report of the Director for 1910, p. 18-19. Later Professor H. L. Fairchild (’12) set forth his views of the retirement of the ice and of the glacial waters of the valley. Other papers dealing with our region and with adjacent areas, also all references to the more distinctly geographic features, will be given in the bibliographic list at the end of this report. PHYSIOGRAPHY OF THE FOUR QUADRANGLES A “quadrangle” as determined by the United States Geological Survey, in mapping the State of New York, is an area covering one-fourth of a degree of latitude and one-fourth of a degree of longitude. It is therefore about 18 miles in length from north to south and about 13 miles from east to west. Our four quadrangles are the Amsterdam, Fonda, Gloversville and Broadalbin, each named from the largest city or village within it. The four taken together from an area 36 miles from north to south and 26 miles from east to west, more than 900 square miles and not far from one-fiftieth of the surface of New York State. The altitudes are shown by contour lines which represent intervals of 20 feet. The maps, which in this report we combine into one, are known as the Amsterdam, Fonda, Gloversville and Broadalbin sheets and can be obtained from the United States Geological Survey, Washington, D. C., for 10 cents each, remittance by post office money order only. The eastern limit of our district runs about three miles west of Schenectady. It passes through South Schenectady and, going northward, runs two miles east of Galway. On the west the border is three miles west of Yosts Station on the New York Central Rail- way, and four miles east of Canajoharie. The northern boundary is two miles north of Northville and runs for its whole length through the southern Adirondack's. The southern boundary is a short dis- tance south of the Cherry valley turnpike and' the villages of Duanesburg, Esperance and Sloansville. Our area includes the major parts of Montgomery and Fulton counties, wide sections of Schenectady and Saratoga counties, and on the north a narrow southern strip of Hamilton county. On the south the Fonda quadrangle includes the northern parts of Carlisle GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 9 and Esperance, which are townships of Schoharie county. At the southeast corner of the Amsterdam quadrangle a slight, we might almost say microscopic, triangular area, belongs to Albany county. It should be remembered that the quadrangles are laid out on lines of latitude and longitude without heeding political units or boundaries. The lowest point in our1 area is where the Mohawk river leaves it, at an altitude a little under 220 feet. The highest point is the sum- mit of Pigeon mountain, just south of the Hamilton and Fulton county boundary. The altitude is slightly under 2800 feet. Pin- nacle, two miles east, is a triangulation station and is given at 2514 feet. The principal drainage of the area is by the Mohawk and its tributaries. The greater part of the Broadalbin quadrangle, how- ever, drains by the Sacandaga river, and the southeastern section of the Amsterdam quadrangle by Norman kill. The physiography of the several parts of our area will be best understood if we first observe the Mohawk river, which follows a somewhat zigzag course, v/ith two northward bends, at Fonda and west of Amsterdam. The trough occupied by the river is narrow and its walls in places rise in steep slopes to levels 400 to 1000 feet above the flood-plains. This inner valley, however, does not adequately show the depth or width of the real Mohawk depression which we may regard as ex- tending from the Adirondacks to the base of the Catskills. The gateway through which the Mohawk enters our region is a gorge 500 feet deep, cut by the river through the uplifted mass on the west side of the Noses fault. This profound and very ancient dislocation is soon lost in the high ground to the south, but to the north its east-facing escarpment runs northward by Sammonsville, Keck Center and Clip Hill, and on to the northeast. The top of the uplifted mass in the Fonda quadrangle is a flattish plateau, topped by limestone and having an altitude of 800 to 900 feet above sea level. Yosts Station is in the gorge and Randall is just outside of it eastward. The gorge at its narrowest point barely offers passage to the river, two railways and two lines of highway. The edge of the uplifted mass is cut by several short, deep stream ways of im- mature form. In both the Fonda and Amsterdam quadrangles rises the elevation within a few miles of the river southward to what we may call plateau levels. Near Glen and Currytown the higher levels are at about 1000 feet above tide, rising to 1300 and above, farther south. The triangulation station on Oak ridge is above 1440 feet, and the Cherry valley turnpike at Carlisle is at 1300 feet. IO NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Conditions are similar on the Amsterdam quadrangle. The tri- angulation station Adebahr, east of Minaville, is at 1062 feet and that of Princetown hill northeast of Mariaville has an altitude of 1434 feet. Similar altitudes occur in the southern third of the quadrangle until we drop down into the valley of Norman kill. The higher parts of the quadrangles south of the river are built of hori- zontally bedded sandstones whose northern outcrops have been bevelled and masked with drift by the movements of the Mohawk glacier. The chief stream entering the Mohawk is Schoharie creek, whose course from Esperance northward is wholly within the eastern border of the Fonda quadrangle. Flowing for more than 100 miles from its sources near the eastern front of the Catskill plateau, it is a broad and copious stream, which in any smaller land would be called a river. The history and significance of the lower Schoharie valley will be set forth in later sections of this report. Yatesville creek and Auriesville creek are the chief southern branches of the Mohawk in the Fonda quadrangle, while in the Amsterdam area we find the South C'huctenunda creek, Sandsea kill and Plotter kill. The gateway by which the Mohawk passes out of our area is as notable a feature as the gorge of the Noses on the west. Within one and one-half miles of the floodplain at Rotterdam Junction the slope rises more than 1000 feet to the hilltop southeast of Water- street triangulation station. On the north side there is, within a single mile of the New York Central Railway, a rise of more than 700 feet. This area of hills on the north is an isolated mass, dropping northward to Glenville and extending a short distance eastward into the Schenectady quadrangle. Our region north of the Mohawk river will be most clearly described by referring at the outset to two great lines of dislocation which have affected the land forms, the rocks, the soils and the industries of the region. Recalling the great fault line and uplift of the Noses, we may follow this line far to the northeast. Re- membering that the upthrown earth block was on the west, we trace the fault past Clip hill, north of the city of Gloversville, about two miles north of Mayfield, and follow it off the Broadalbin quadrangle west of Northville. The uplift in the northern parts of the dis- location is placed at 1500 feet. It is to be understood that fault scarps are much disguised by down-wear and the accumulation of rock waste. The geologist finds signs of the actual amount of “ throw,” which are not obvious to the untrained observer, GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK II The other dislocation which demands our attention is the Batchellerville fault, which runs from Batchellerville past Northampton and then bears several miles to the southeast. The steep-sided mountains east of the line are the upthrown block of crystalline rock, and here also the vertical displacement is about 1500 feet. These and other faults of this region are described by Miller (Ti, p. 38-50). The triangular area between these faults is a down-sunken block of sedimentary rocks, chiefly limestones, and shales. Consider this triangle as extending southward, widening as we go, until we base it on the Mohawk river. We have roughly an equilateral triangle of 25 miles on each side; its altitude rises from 400, 500 or 600 feet near the river to an average of about 800 feet northward over most of its surface. It is higher in the hilly belt running from the base of Clip hill eastward past Gloversville and Broadalbin, and lower in much of the Sacandaga basin. Considered from the Mohawk river we have here a reentrant lowland, flanked on either side by spurs of the southern Adirondacks. Here, we may observe in a preliminary way, we find the leading development of human activity in our area. Here are the largest communities, from Amsterdam and Fonda, to Johnstown, Glovers- ville and Broadalbin, midway, and Northville at the northern apex of the sunken block. The limestones and shales afiford soils superior to those of the mountains, or the sandstone plateau at the south, and the lower altitudes insure hardly mild, but at least more lenient, climatic conditions. The primary physical condition (we refrain from saying cause ) is in the fact that the sinking of the tri- angular block saved the soil-forming limestones and shales from erosion and removal. Considering then the Catskill wilderness on the south, the Adiron- dack forests on the north, the flanking mountain spurs and the nar- row entrance and narrow exit of the Mohawk river, we may say that we have a somewhat circumscribed geographic area. What degree, if any, of historical, cultural or industrial unity, based upon physical unity, we may find here, may be better determined in the fuller studies that will follow in this report. We should here recur to our physiographic description and give a few facts concerning the drainage north of the Mohawk river. An important branch of the river is Chuctenunda creek, which has its sources in the Amsterdam reservoir and adjoining slopes. It pursues a southwestward course for a dozen miles, past Hagaman and Rock- ton, and makes a rapid descent over the bed rocks, entering the Mo- 12 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM hawk at Amsterdam, flowing violently under the walls of mills which have grown up upon its banks. The Cayudutta creek flows southwest ward from Glover sville and Johnstown, makes a sharp turn at Sammonsville and enters the river at Fonda. We mention also the small Crabb kill, because it flows from Glenville through a gap in the hills, and joins the Alplaus kill in the Schenectady quadrangle. The Sacandaga river, entering our region two miles north of North- ville, makes a sharp bend at Northampton and takes a north by north- east course past Edinburg. It flows then into Stony Creek quadrangle and makes its exit to the Hudson through the gap at Conklingville. Without question this stream in preglacial times flowed southward to the Mohawk river. Its diversion will be discussed later. Through Kenneatto creek and its widespreading branches, it drains considerable territory from Hagadorns Mills, Broadalbin and Vail Mills to May- field and the mountains north of Jackson summit. Much of the moun- tain region above Gloversville drains out of the quadrangle westward. Most of our region shows a singular dearth of lakes. This is the more remarkable in an area which was heavily scored by glaciation and is the bearer of very considerable bodies of drift. Except Featherstone lake above Mariaville and two or three small lakes in the mountains east of the Sacandaga river, we do not recall a single natural body of water save in the mountains northward from Glovers- ville, where are some twenty lakes, most if not all due to drift block- ades in the valleys. The largest is Peck lake, which with the con- nected East lake and Flelen Gould lake, gives a continuous water run of about four miles. The absence of lakes in the great morainic belt of Gloversville and Broadalbin is perhaps due to the porosity of the subsoils and facile subterranean drainage. THE ICE INVASION IN NEW YORK We shall better understand the ice work of the Mohawk region if we take a general view of the ice movements in the State as a whole. Before we make this survey, however, we shall, for the aid of the reader who is not versed in geology, go farther afield. The center of . movement for the ice sheet which swept over the northeastern states was in the moderately high grounds of the Labrador region. Thence as the snows gathered and the ice increased, there was a vast south- ward movement across Quebec and Ontario into the United States. Not all the ice was formed in Labrador, for the snows of that time made ice in southern Canada and in the mountains of New GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 13 England and New York. There were local glaciers in the Adiron- dacks before there was an ice sheet covering almost the whole State. Imagine the St Lawrence valley filling with the moving ice, which began to bank against the Adirondacks and Green Mountains and to flow through the deep and wide Champlain valley which lies between the two mountain areas. The ice lobe which entered the Champlain valley flowed southward. The ice that struck the Green mountain range moved to the south- east. The Adirondacks stood in the path of the oncoming ice, and split its flow, one current going up Champlain and the other up the St Lawrence valley in a southwesterly direction. Although ice is to ordinary experience rigid, it flows like a stiffly plastic mass into the lowest grounds in its path. Ice currents flanked the Adirondacks on the east and on the north- west. On the east the stream pushed forward until it reached to the latitude of New York City. On the southwest it rounded the moun- tains and filled the Ontario valley, which then held no lake. In the southward movement along the Champlain channel, the ice spread out southeast upon New England and southwest upon the Adirondacks. Linding low ground west of Albany, it pushed up the great Mohawk depression and created there a westward-flowing ice lobe. The thickening and active ice was thus surrounding the Adiron- dacks and rising upon their slopes and penetrating their valleys. At length it rose, as believed by most observers, above every Adirondack summit, even Mount Marcy, and swept southwestward over the whole mountain area. The glacial striae in almost every part of the Adirondacks show this direction of movement. In this stage the ice overtopped the Mohawk flow and took a steady southwest direction across the plateau of southern New York, toward and beyond the Pennsylvania line. At the same time the ice going over the western Adirondacks and through the St Lawrence and Ontario lowlands, pushed over central and western New York in the same southwesterly flow. This southwesterly flow dominated the State save on its eastern border, in the great Champlain-Hudson trough. Here the movement was southward. South of the lower Mohawk valley the Helderberg highland formed a wedge which split the southward Hudson flow from the Mohawk lobe and helped to send the ice at the height of glaciation southwest across the western Catskills and the upper Sus- quehanna region. We can picture the ice sheet as shrouding from view all of New York except part of Long Island and a corner in the southwestern part of the State. 4 NE\V YORK STATE MUSEUM GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 15 When the great glacier melted and disappeared from New York, the events were in an order the reverse of what we have just described. When we speak of a retiring ice sheet we mean that its front on the whole melts away faster than the push from the central area sends it forward. Such melting back is not a uniform process but is accom- panied by pauses and readvances. If the ice front remains in one place for a long time a moraine may be built, which in a time of waning ice cover, we call a recessional moraine. Many such accu- mulations of rock waste were left in the Empire State by the reced- ing ice. Viewing the disappearance in general, we may say that the plateau stretching from the Catskills to Lake Erie was laid bare, and perhaps small areas of the higher parts of the Adirondacks and Catskills be- came bare. With this lowering process, the general southwestward movement ceased and the deeper and wider valleys began to control the flow as they had done in the advance of the ice. Again the ice flowed in somewhat distinct, broad streams, or lobes, along the Cham- plain-Hudson trough and up the Mohawk valley to the west. Again a wide stream pushed up the St Lawrence and filled the Ontario basin. From the Ontario basin prolonged and rather strong glaciers cov- ered the lake counties of western New York and pushed up the valleys of the Finger lakes and the Genesee river. An offset from the St Lawrence lobe also flowed along Black river valley, around the south- western Adirondacks and down the upper Mohawk channel as far as Little Falls. Glaciers of some strength still flowed southwestward in the southern valleys of the Adirondacks, and stagnant ice seems to have lain long and widely over the mountain region. The Mohawk lobe had resumed its early westward flow in the valley as far as Little Falls and on the hills southward to a region south of the city of Utica. The southern plateau, extending, in general, everywhere south of the Cherry valley turnpike, was no longer covered with active ice. Before we take up the study in detail of the Mohawk glacier in the four quadrangles, it will be useful to set forth a few general con- siderations. EXPLANATORY CONSIDERATIONS In glacial geology the term “lobe” is used of a broad stream or body of ice advancing or retreating in an open valley or wide basin. There were, for example, glacial lobes in the valleys where now are the several Great lakes, a Michigan, an Erian, an Ontarian lobe etc. In the same manner we refer to the ice streams that entered the Champlain, Hudson and Mohawk troughs. i6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM A lobe of glacial ice moved in what Chamberlin has called an “ axi- radiant ” fashion, that is, along with a central forward or axial flow there were divergent flows curving outward in a radial manner toward the rim of the basin on either side. When we say that a glacier moved up a valley, we do not mean that it controverts the ordinary law of flowage. Water is pushed up inclines out of depressions in the bed of descending streams. The surface of the streams inclines in the direction of flow, while the bottom currents may move uphill. This is not a perfect analogy but in some measure helps us to see how a great glacier might be pushed up the valley of the St Lawrence, or the valley of Seneca lake, or the valleys of the Champlain and the Mohawk. Champlain ice was pushed up to the locality of Whitehall and Fort Ann by the impulse of vast and thick ice fields in the St Lawrence Basin. The surface of the lobe was all the time inclined southward. Mohawk ice was pushed westward to the longitude of Utica and upward from the Albany region to altitudes of 1600 feet. The impulse was the push of the Champlain-Hudson mass, backed by the mountains of New England, which thrust the ice uphill along the Mohawk. The surface of the ice at all times declined westward. We observe further, that in our region, as in most glacial tracts outside of high mountain areas, the major or more massive features of the topography are of preglacial origin. In other words, the mountains, plateaus, escarpments and main valleys all came into existence before the ice invasion. There is not a foot of surface in our four quadrangles which is the same as before the glacial period. But the Adirondack elevations of the Gloversville and Broadalbin areas were made inconceivably long before the glacial time. We may say the same, though the degrees of geological antiquity are widely variant, of the Mohawk valley in the broad sense, of the Noses escarpment and of the high areas south of the river. In brief, the changes wrought by ice were universal and important, and modified, but did not destroy, the preexisting great features of the region. Long experience in teaching the facts of glaciation makes it seem necessary to the author to caution the reader against the conclusion that ice was revolutionary in its effects. What the real and everywhere striking results were, will appear as we proceed with our study of the land forms and surface deposits of our region. Some explanation of glacial striae, or rock gravings, is desirable at this point. Glaciers gather or pluck rock masses, large and small, in their course, and the bottom ice is often shod with these frag- ments. As they are shoved over the bed rock surfaces bv the movirw GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 17 mass, they produce the gravings to which we refer. These vary from the finest hair lines to pronounced grooves and mouldings. They are preserved or not, according to the character of the bed rock and its situation. They are least apt to be found on soft shales. They are finely preserved on limestone unless that rather soluble rock has been long at the surface and exposed to weathering. Sandstones being hard and relatively insoluble take and preserve the graving records well, especially if of rather fine grain. The crystalline rocks are variable in this respect and may show flutings where they do not preserve fine lines. Striae are often found in the best state of preservation where the overlying drift has protected them until excavations for road-making or quarrying have brought to light the surface of the rock. It is to be understood that the striae found in the observations of the geologist are, like fossils, only an infinitesimal fraction of those which exist. Could we strip the drift and all fragmental material from the bed rocks of New York we should find tens of thousands of square miles of rock floor scored by these tools of the ice sheet. A further fact about these memorials of the ice invasion, it is now particularly important to understand. Much of the surface of New York was covered by the moving ice of one or more ice invasions for tens of thousands of years. During all such durations glacial striae were being made and destroyed. How many different sets of striae thus came into existence and were filed away by the ever-working ice, we can not even imagine. What we do know is that the striae now found in a region repre- sent the very last ice movements of that region. Not all the existing striae are of equal age, because the ice wrought later on some grounds than on others. Thus we have already given ground for the inference that striae in the heights of the Adirondacks and the Appalachians are older than those of the Mohawk or St Lawrence Valleys, because these lower grounds longer retained active currents of ice. RECORD OF STRIAE Somewhat more than 80 examples are recorded in this list and plotted on the map. On account of the heavy cover of drift and water-laid material, the smallest number appears on the Broadalbin quadrangle. Most of the localities are sufficiently described as to position to enable the interested observer to find them. All the read- ings given are magnetic. i8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Broadalbin Quadrangle One mile north of Northville by roadside on crystalline rock, S io° E. One-half mile east of Northville on Potsdam sandstone. Ranges S io° E to S io° W, given on map as S. Two miles south of Sacandaga Park on Potsdam sandstone, S. 35° W. Two and one-half miles south of Sacandaga Park on Little Falls dolomite, S 240 W. Two miles southwest of Cranberry creek, in limestone, Mercer’s quarry, S 45 0 W. Near Fox hill above Batchellerville, two localities on crystallines, S 28° W and S 350 W. Three-fourths mile south of Mosherville on sandstone, N 30° W. Near North Galway, northwest, on quartz, two localities N 38° W and N 450 W. Three-fourths mile east of Amsterdam reservoir on sandstone, N. 70° W. One mile west of Galway N 6o° W. One-fourth mile farther west N 570 W. Amsterdam Quadrangle Eastern part of Amsterdam by Kellogg railroad, and eastward N 65° W, N 70° W, N 720 W. Two and one-half miles southwest of Galway, S 8o° to 85° W. One-mile north of Glenville on sandstone, direction due west. One mile southeast of Manny’s Corners, by road to Cranesville, on sandstone, N 8o° W. Two miles north of Hoffman Ferry on county line road, by road- side, N 8o° W. North of Rectors Station, two miles from Mohawk river, on east- ern boundary of Amsterdam quadrangle, S 70° W. One-half mile west of Pattersonville, N 740 W. One-fourth mile west of last, N 50° W. One-half mile north of Rynex Corners, on sandstone, W to W io° S. One-half mile north of Princetown, two localities, S 60° W and S 750 W. One-fourth mile east of Mariaville pond, on sandstone. N 8o° W. South of Princetown Hill, on planed area of sandstone, direction due west. Two miles east northeast of Duanesburg on upper road near road intersection, S 70° W to W. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 19 One and one-fourth miles south of Scotch Bush, on sandstone, by road junction, S 450 W. One and one-half miles west of Scotch Bush, S 450 to 6o° W. One-half mile southeast of last, S 450 to 550 W. Three-fourths mile northeast of Millers Corners, S 20° to 30° W. Two and one-half miles south-southeast of Braman’s Corners, by schoolhouse, S 8o° W. Three-fourths mile south of last, slightly variant, average west. Same directions slightly south, also one-half mile west. Fonda Quadrangle One-half mile north of Tribes Hill on limestone, N 70° W. West of Noses Escarpment on the high ground west of Sam- monsville and Berryville are three sets of striae, with directions N 60 0 to 65° W, N 60 0 to 70° W, and N 64° W. Southwest of Randall above road intersection, S. 720 W. Three miles west-southwest of Mill Point, two miles northeast of Charleston, four localities (see map) directions respectively tak- ing the exposures from north to south, S 8o° W, S 76° W, S 76° W, and due west. One mile southeast of Charleston, S 68° W. Three miles east of Charleston, S 65° W. Two miles northwest of Charleston, near road intersections, four sets of striae, all S 70° W. Two miles north of Rural Grove, S 67° to 78° W. One mile east of last, S 70° W. One-half mile west of Carlisle, N 8o° W. One and a fourth miles west of Sloansville, N 6o° W to W. One mile north of Oak ridge, Wand’s quarry, W. Three-fourths mile southeast of Carytown, N 85° W. Two sets on road between Oak Ridge and Esperance, N 76° W. One-half mile southwest of Burtonsville, S 70° W. One mile north of Burtonsville, S 65° W. Close to above by schoolhouse, directions, S 450 W, S 65° W, and W. Gloversville Quadrangle Two miles north-northeast of Mayfield, Merl Haines quarry in limestone, groovings, S 30° to 40° W. One-third mile west of altitude figure, Clip hill, on crystalline rock, N 66° W. Near west end of Mountain lake, moulding rather than scratches, fairly trustworthy, S 20° W. One-half mile south of Bleecker, by roadside, S 450 W. In the edge of Bleecker, south of bridge, on roadside, S 40° W. 20 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM One mile from BleecKer, on road to Bleecker Center, S 40° W. One-half mile toward Bleecker Center from last-named locality, on roadside, S 50° W. One-half mile north of East Sake, S 45 0 W. One mile east of Bleecker Center, on roadside, faint but trust- worthy, S 30° W. Opposite (east of) Lily lake, on roadside, S 40° W. One-half mile north of Bleecker, S 40° W. One mile west of Bleecker Center, top of hill, in front of Roman Catholic Church, S 45° W. Outcrop extends 40 rods down road to east, showing striae of same direction. One and one-half miles east of Pine Lake Post Office, on rock sloping 30° to south, S 8o° W. Two miles east of West Caroga lake, on Bleecker-Caroga town line, ledge on west side of road, S 75 0 W. One-half mile south of last, in field of roches moutonnees char- acter, partially drift covered, S 6o° to 70° W. West of lower end of Peck lake, on road leading northeast from main road, S 45 0 W. Oil main road midway between Peck lake and East Caroga lake, on irregular ledge sloping steeply to west, S 350 to 550 W. North end of Wheelerville, N 8o° W, with some grooving varying to S 80 0 W. Near Indian lake, furrow S 8o° W, may be regarded as fairly trustworthy. One-half mile west of Lindsley’s Corners, groove running north by south. Same place, probable scratches, S 20° W. One half mile south of Lindsley’s Corners, on roadside, good example, S 50° W. West of Pinnacle Post Office, S 50° W. Summit of Pinnacle, 2514 feet, considerable areas of roches moutonnees around the United States Geological Survey Station. Line lines have weathered out, but in several places broadly concave furrows run S 40° to 50° W. These furrows begin abruptly on the stoss side and are less apparent on the lee side. One or two sharp and narrow gougings are probably trustworthy. Reference may be made to striae found slightly west over the border of Lassellsville quadrangle. North of Arietta, at the north- east corner of the quadrangle, are striae running S 70° W. On the road from Bradtville (Lassellsville quadrangle) 100 feet above road on steep slope facing east, N 65° to 70° W. This locality is just west, on the map, of the name Caroga, denoting the creek. These striae fall in line with those of Clip Hill four miles east-southeas*. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 21 It will be noted that they are at a right angle with the striae of the mountains northeastward. Three miles east of the village of Las- sellsville on the south side of the main highway are roches moutonnees having a direction of N 50° W. DISCUSSION OF THE GLACIAL STRIAE In order to bring out more clearly the meaning of the glacial gravings in our region, figure 2 has been prepared. The four quadrangles are divided into 36 sections each representing one- twelfth of a degree of latitude and longitude, as indicated on all sheets of a scale of one mile to the inch. The striations have been plotted, the only other data being the course of the Mohawk river and the axial or median line of the interlobate moraine which crosses 22 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM the Gloversville and Broadalbin quadrangles. The sections of the map are numbered for easy reference. It is at once apparent that most of the striae north of the moraine have a general southwesterly course, varying from south-southwest to west-southwest. These directions are in harmony with Adiron- dack glaciation as we know it in many quadrangles to the northward. The north by south gravings in sections 4 and 5 are in the Sacandaga valley near Northville and are evidence of the control of that valley, exercised upon late ice flows, and probably also on the lower ice of the thickest or maximum flow. The remaining exceptions are two records in section 13, which are a little north of the axis of the interlobate moraine. They are, however, within the northern half of the moraine belt and therefore within the sweep of the Mohawk lobe as it moved westward. The greater part of section to is covered by the Sacandaga marshes, as 11 and 12 to the east are deeply buried in glacial drift. With the exception of section 13, referred to above, no section crossed by the morainic axis has yielded us a graving record. Within the domain of the Mohawk lobe the trend of striae is prevailingly westward, but with interesting variations mostly of plain meaning. We see at a glance the “axi-radiant” flow of the ice mass. Along the axial parts of the flow at its eastern entrance upon the wider Mohawk depression, the directions are westward. There are two localities of striae north of the river, tending to the north- west. The first is on sections 13 and 19, all of these striae being on the plateau above the escarpment of the Noses fault. The other area is in section 18, Broadalbin quadrangle, the dis- trict near Galway, North Galway and Mosherville. Here the average direction is about northwest. The northward tendency is more than one would expect to find, within so short a distance of the locality in which the Mohawk lobe began to push away from the Hudson Valley ice. Possibly there were local reasons for northward divergence, but none was discovered. The reader will observe the wide sweep of the central area in which few records appear. From the north border of sections 26, 27 and 28, to sections n and 12, the only examples found are in sections 21 and 22. In other words, we range with but one excep- tion in a broad belt from the village of Glen past Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville to the Sacandaga river and the eastern border of the Broadalbin quadrangle, over a region that has revealed no record. When we come to the plotted records south of the Mohawk river, the “axi-radiant” movement is very clearly shown, in a consistent GLACIAL geology of the lower mohawk 23 west by southwest trend. This is well seen from Scotch Bush past Glen and Charleston, going westward. The same tendency is evident but less strong in the southern sections of the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles. On the south border, as beyond Sloansville and Carlisle, are scratches which point a little north of west. Here the valley troughs of Norman kill and Cobleskill seem to have had some influence on the glacial movements. Following what has been said, we may be subject to erroneous inferences as to the part played by the immediate valley of the Mohawk. To avoid this let us now observe that the river pursues a sinuous, not to say angular, course across our two southern quad- rangles. From Amsterdam toward Schenectady it is in a narrow steep-walled valley having nearly a southeast direction. Except through the gorgelike gateway at and below Rotterdam Junction, access to or from the Hudson lowlands is barred by broad masses of hills reaching 800 to 1000 feet above the river. A glacial flow from the northeast or even from the east, would be against these hills and athwart many miles of the river before the stream issues upon the Schenectady lowland. Hence we may without hesitation say that the inner trough of the Mohawk is too narrow and too crooked to have controlled the flow of the Mohawk glacial lobe. We must look to the Adirondacks farther north and to the Helderberg escarpment and the Catskills farther south for the real gate posts between which the invading ice flowed into and was pushed along the Mohawk belt to central New York. STRIAE BEYOND THE BORDERS OF OUR AREA Referring to certain gravings in sections 1 and 7 of the skeleton map, we note a direction nearly or quite due west. Similar records occur just over the border, in the northeast corner of the Lassells- ville quadrangle, these striae being just north of the Hamilton county boundary. It would seem that the westward thrust of the Mohawk ice in time of greatest vigor may have pushed the Adirondack flow into partial conformity to its westward direction. Also in Lassellsville quadrangle westward from section 13, opposite its northwest corner, near Bradtville, are striae on a steep east-facing slope, with a direction of N 65° to 70° W. These are in line with the two records shown on section 13 and they show the strong flow of Mohawk ice which reached an altitude of 1200 feet above the Noses escarpment, and then passed on the altitudes of 1G00 to 1800 feet west of Caroga creek. In harmony with the striae just named are the roches moutonnees east of Lassellsville. 24 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM On the east of our locality in section 30, in the hill region west of Town House Corners, Schenectady quadrangle, Professor Stoller has noted two examples of striae running south of west. The more northerly of these runs S 570 W and is midway between our record on section 30 and Van Etten triangulation station, just over the border of the Schenectady quadrangle. In the Saratoga quadrangle between East Galway and Rock City Falls we have a record of S 520 W. A discussion of the crossed and other scratches of the Berne quadrangle and westward will be given in the section which describes the limits of the Mohawk lobe. THE INTERLOB ATE MORAINE We begin our description of this belt of morainic hills by observing that the half of the city of Gloversville lying east of Main street is built upon some of these elevations which here and throughout most of their course are of a highly sandy character. East of the city on the Broadalbin road, the hills are of low altitude, but the ground is typical in its irregular form and sandy almost to barrenness, although there are many homes and there is some cultivation. From two to four miles out of Gloversville several drumlins rise out of the sand hills, contrasting with the morainic hills, somewhat as an oasis differs from the surrounding desert. The morainic belt narrows north of Vail Mills and passes on the north of Broadalbin with a width of less than a half mile. Just to the westward of Vail Mills, however, the moraine is about four miles wide and is crossed diagonally for more than that distance by the railway between Vail Mills and Broadalbin Junction. It then continues southward of the railway into Gloversville. We may profitably trace the moraine eastward on its southern border, leaving Gloversville on the road leading to West Perth. It is not easy to draw a boundary line between the morainic sand and the till to the southward. This section shades from moraine into drumlin forms and from sand into till. The first impression that the Mohawk lobe partially overrode the moraine, masking it with its own forms and material, was confirmed a year later, when on a second visit, the moraine showed a drumloid south edge with more vegetation, more tillage, fewer pines and more deciduous trees than it exhibited when seen from the north. Following the moraine westward from Gloversville we observe that the city west of Main street is built mainlv on hills of till. West GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 25 of the city we find the moraine, which widens past Meco and thence westward, is more than three miles wide to the base of the Noses escarpment and is a confused mass of sandy hills with thoroughly obstructed drainage. Under the escarpment west of Meco the sand hills show many boulders and they are all constructional morainic forms not modified by wind action. The moraine continues with strong forms and massive breadth to the western border of the quadrangle. The hills are high and many of them sandy in the desert sense, with few boulders. Many sections show discordant stratification. A mile west of Cork the map shows several depression contours. There are no ponds, their absence being due to the light and porous character of the materials of the moraine. Eastward of Broadalbin the moraine is less coherent, being found in long tongues and patches. These bodies of washed drift conform to the general northeast by southwest trend of the topography and are not so obviously of an interlobate character. They are on the north edge of the belt of territory in which the Mohawk lobe began to swing westward and diverge from the Hudson lobe. This movement was therefore in a direction nearly parallel to the ice movement from the mountain mass in the northeast parts of the Broadalbin quadrangle. A narrow morainic strip of washed drift extends from Broadalbin past Union Mills. Another belt stretches northeast from Haga- dorns Mills. Other areas are found about Barkersville, especially to the east. West of Barkersville are bouldery morainic hills of till. Southward from these localities the topographic forms show no pre- vailing trends. This is significant in view of the fact that our ex- amples of striae pointing northwestward lie in this region, near North Galway, Galway and Mosherville. While as already stated, the pro- nounced north element in the direction is not easy to explain, we have in the patchy moraines, the irregular trends of the hills and the direc- tion of the gravings, evidence of an area of doubtful and shifting movements of ice masses that were coming into opposing conditions in relation to each other. Farther west the southward course of the Sacandaga ice and the westward course of the Mohawk ice have left clear records in the moraine, in the striae and in the linear elements of the topography. An interesting succession of waterlaid drift hills in the Saratoga quadrangle, as described by Professor Stoller, seems to correlate with the washed drift last described in the Broadalbin quadrangle. These hills stretch from Corinth to East Galway, the only important break being around Porter’s Corners. They lie on the lower slopes of the high ground which extends from the Saratoga region to the 26 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM eastern limb of the Sacandaga river in the Broadalbin quadrangle. They are described as kame terraces. (Stoller T6, p. 20-22). Professor Stoller, however, notes very carefully, elements of topo- graphy and structure such as the preserved kames, which show that these masses are not .always flat-topped with ice-contact slopes. It does not therefore seem in conflict with his interpretation to suppose that considerable parts of this belt of hills are morainic and were laid down against the mountain side when the Hudson lobe was still, active and exercising its thrust into the Mohawk opening. We should thus have with little interruption a series of washed drift masses, from Corinth to the plateau of the Noses fault, a morainic belt lateral to the Hudson lobe in the east, becoming inter- lobate, as already described, in the west. West of our area a narrow belt of kames has been observed on both sides of the main highway from two or three miles east of Lassellsville. This is in alignment with our interlobate moraine passing by Cork, down the Noses escarpment to the east. Cushing refers to a morainic belt crossing the Little Falls quad- rangle from the northwest by way of Barto hill and Salisbury Center, to the eastern edge of the quadrangle (Cushing, ’05, p. 75). Whether this moraine is continuous with the Lassellsville moraine and that of Gloversville has not been determined. PERTLLBROADALBIN TILL PLAIN In the northern part of the township of Perth and the southern section of Broadalbin is a high plain showing an evenness of surface unmatched by any equal area in the region here studied. It reaches from Perth village eastward toward West Galway, and extends northward several miles, its boundaries as shown on the map being somewhat arbitrary. The altitudes range from 800 to 950 feet, streams have made little headway in dissecting the area, and the cen- tral parts show no surface drainage that could be mapped. There is no considerable deposit of sand save at one locality. Wells nowhere reach the bed rock. Such evidence as we have indicates that we have here, south of the morainic belt, a till plain of remark- able smoothness, with deposits of considerable depth. The locality mentioned as exceptional is a narrow east by west ridge, lying toward the east, and north of the center of the plain and colored as kame. It is moderately morainic, with low knolls of sandy loam and some small kettle holes. Toward the eastern end is an opening of sand, with large stones and apparent absence of stratifi- cation. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 27 We have here, closely related to the interlobate moraine, a massive deposit of doubtful origin. It may have been an overridden and smoothed drift of earlier deposition and the powerful Mohawk gla- cier may have thus pushed vigorously over its northern field as it seems to have done southeast of Gloversville and west of Johnstown. In any case the ridge of moraine just described has not been over- ridden and may have been built between the northern and southern icefields. The suggestion just made, regarding a push of the Mohawk glacier deserves a further word. We consider first the fact that the Mohawk lobe must have strengthened in its westward flow or regained it from a state of com- parative inaction, after the southwestern flow in the Adirondacks ceased to be effective. Stagnation or an earlier ablation in the Sacan- daga region would have facilitated a northward, smoothing drive across the previous interlobate mass about Perth, and might have made those northwest striae which we find in Galway, and to the westward would have moulded the south edge of the moraine toward Johnstown and Gloversville into drumlin forms. THE SACANDAGA GLACIER When the northern ice was in its maximum flow down the southern Adirondacks there was, strictly speaking, no Sacandaga glacier. As the ice thinned, however, flow in this region concentrated upon the Sacandaga valley, which, widening into the great triangular lowland south of Northville, gave the ice opportunity to fan out into what we may without serious impropriety call a glacial lobe. We have considerable evidence as to its frontal positions in vari- ous stages of its recession, when it was, by melting, uncovering the areas of the great “Vly” and pouring its waters into the Lake Sacan- daga, later to be described. A belt of low, morainic hills breaks off from the interlobate moraine southwest of Munsonville and extends without much inter- ruption to the bend of the Sacandaga river at Northampton. Here are low and flowing contours, free from stone. The belt is between sections of the great marsh, is thickly settled by prosperous farmers, working a soil of sandy loam and extending their culture very much into the lands given as marsh by the topographer. This belt is quite probably a moraine laid down in the waters of the developing Lake Sacandaga, and in any case its gentle contours and silty soils show that it was mantled with lacustrine deposits. We do not know how much of the bases of these areas at Munsonville may have been buried by lake and marsh deposits. In any case they seem to repre- sent a pause in the recession of the ice in the Sacandaga valley. 28 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM On the west side of the lowland and west of Tamarack swamp we observe a belt of till moraine which may be contemporaneous with the knolls and outwash of the Munsonville belt. Northeast and north of Osborn Bridge two narrow belts of kamelike drift rise on the slopes. Near their upper ends is a patch of till moraine. These bodies of drift are terminal to later stages of the recession and fall in well with the morainic areas west of Sacandaga Park. These masses of washed drift seem to correspond well to a term- inal moraine found at the south or upper end of Gifford valley, a short mountain valley whose north-flowing stream enters the Sacan- daga on the west above Northville. The moraine is on the col between this deep, short valley and the great lowland south of Sacan- daga Park. We have here a remarkably complete small example of what a glacier and its waters will produce. The moraine is of fine crescentic shape, of sand and gravel, forming a ridge, highest at the east end, one-third of a mile long, with a spillway at the west end. Here the moraine is low and narrow and south of it is a short gorge. West of the gorge the rock is swept bare and shows roches moutonees forms. South of the moraine, slopes of sandy outwash sweep down into the north end of Tamarack swamp. The mountain west of Sacandaga Park separated this small glacier from the parent trunk glacier which then lay over the site of Northville. Before leaving this section of the Sacandaga basin the reader will find it worth while to observe, on the general map, the succession of deposits as we pass up the hillside adjoining the more northerly of two masses of washed drift. Read the following series from the bottom upward. 8 Ground moraine (till) 7 Karnes 6 Sand plain 5 Ground moraine (till) 4 Northville, or Sacandaga delta 3 River terrace 2 Flood plain i Sacandaga river Proceeding across the ridge east of Northville we find interesting conditions about Edinburg. West of Edinburg we have a sand plain, bisected by the waters of Butler creek. It is a delta built against an ice tongue which occupied the main valley at the time of retreat. North of Edinburg on the west side of the river are strong kames which, directly north of the village, rise 260 feet above the river. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 29 The kame belt is mainly west of the valley road, but the sands run across the road and meet the flood plain of the Sacandaga. In the southern or higher part of the kames near Edinburg the sands are quite barren and considerable patches are exposed. The surfaces are almost free from boulders though one 6 by 8 feet was seen by the roadside. The kames decline at the northern border of the quadrangle by Coldbrook Cemetery and a schoolhouse. On the ad- joining, or Stony Creek, quadrangle, lateral or kame terraces appear to extend some distance down the river with heights of 150 to 200 feet. The hook-shaped extension of the drift mass toward the river, east of Edinburg, as one goes toward the bridge, suggests the pres- ence of a terminal moraine breached by the stream. We note the bouldery till on the lower slopes east of the river and north of Batchellerville. Thus the various conditions about Edinburg show a noteworthy pause in the ice recession here, corresponding well with terminal deposits north of Osborn Bridge and west of Sacandaga Park. The ice front would be likely to stand a little farther south in the more open valley, fed by the ice of the upper Sacandaga basin. North of Northville, near the north border of the quadrangle, is a massive moraine on both sides of the river but strongest on the east, standing at the head of the delta of the glacial Lake Sacandaga. Before leaving the Sacandaga glacier we may profitably refer to a belt of terminal moraine which Professor Stoller has described as found south of Corinth and Palmer, in the Saratoga quadrangle. His account is on pages 22 to 25 of the bulletin to which reference has already been made. This moraine correlates well with the reces- sional deposits found in the northern parts of the Broadalbin quadrangle. DRUMLINS More than forty of these ellipsoid hills in our region are so nearly typical in form that they have received recognition on the map. This is a small number as compared with the great development of these forms in western New York, Wisconsin and parts of New England, but we have enough examples to show that in the southern half of the Gloversville quadrangle and in the northern half of the Fonda quadrangle there existed in the later stages of Mohawk glaciation that condition of balance between the erosive and depositional capacity of an ice sheet which permits the building of drumlins. Many other hills might, without violence, have been mapped as drumlins but it seems better to include them under the general category of drumloid and linear forms, which will be taken up in 30 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM the next section of this report. The drumlins are developed in the greatest number and perfection about the cities of Gloversville and Johnstown. Some of these hills in their most characteristic form may be seen by driving four miles from Gloversville on the road to Vail Mills, turning northward to Mayfield and returning to the city by the road which is directly north of the Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville Railway. They are short, broadly ellipsoid forms in their ground plan and rise to heights which give them steep slopes. Several are a half mile each in length and have heights of about loo feet. In the northeastern section of Gloversville, near the race track, is a drumlin about 60 feet high (fig. 21) while at the northeast of it is an example having a height of about 150 feet. North of this, across the railway, we have a hill which exhibits what we may call twin drumlins. Some of the drumlins are bouldery in places or have morainic ground around them or on their lower slopes. In the western part of Gloversville and northward along the road to Mountain lake are several drumlins of more or less perfect form. The hill north of Kingsboro on the west of the road leading to the mountains has a rather imperfect or irregular crest line, is bouldery on its east slopes and suggests that the ice ceased to be active before the drumlin could receive a symmetrical modeling. Going north toward Mountain lake, we find a group of five drum- lins one-half mile north of the east by west section of the electric railway. One of these hills carries the highway. The contours do not show the rather spacious valley between the drumlins and the mountain side on the north of them. All these drumlins are quite abundant in boulders as we might expect from their proximity to the mountain slope along which the glacier proceeded from the northeast. These hills and those on the road to Mayfield show how the Sacandaga ice tended to swing into a direction parallel to the lines of movement of the Mohawk ice. It is significant that several drumlins north and east of Gloversville and around Johnstown have fields of boulders on their eastern or stoss slopes. In the drumlin group toward Mountain lake, the east end of the drumlins and of the troughs between them is in places so thickly set with boulders that one might almost step from one to the other across the fields. At one point the bouldery and fluted side slope of the drumlin is banked with sandy moraine for some distance up from its base. From the top of the most easterly of this group of five drumlins one has a remarkable view of the varied crest lines of glacial forms. The ellipsoid profiles of the drumlins are visible north, south, east GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 31 and west. Southward is seen the irregular and notched profile of the morainic belt running west from Gloversville. Most of the hills in and around Johnstown are drumlins, and some are well and symmetrically shaped, all showing distinctly the west- ward movement of the molding agent. The leading topographic feature of Johnstown is the great circular drumlin south of the principal east and west thoroughfare, the hill itself carrying more than a dozen streets on its slopes and summit. This topography con- tinues all the way to West Perth, six miles to the east. The Roman Catholic cemetery of Johnstown east of the city is on the west end of a large drumlin. The road to Tribes Hill crosses the southwest slope and here sections of till are sandy, have few boulders and show fragments of Utica shale eroded from the bed rock of the region. Four drumlins lie nearly in a north and south series south of the cemetery, east of the railway. All have moderate size, in area and in height, and all are steep at the east end. Other drumlins in this neighborhood are close to the railway on the west. Drumlins lie west of the city, encircling the Battle Monument and between the roads that lead to Cork and to Keck Center. As we have before suggested, the drumlins so mapped do not adequately express the drumlin-making activity of the glacier around Gloversville and Johnstown. The field notes describe a view from a slope south of the interlobate moraine and facing it. “It (the moraine) is distinguished as far as visible as a belt of light forest in contrast with the general clearing of the ground southward. The great ridge breaks into a sea of drumlins at its west end, and the hills are more individual and typical forms as we go farther west toward Johnstown.” As throwing light on the latter part of this section we should refer to molded drift of this character at the base of the Noses escarpment. As one leaves the Fonda delta at Perryville and proceeds westward, great drumloid spurs of till project from the escarpment and reach down to the delta. Many boulders are on them and at the east end they are typical drumlins in their form. A few drumlins were mapped south of the Mohawk river in Glen township. Combining the Gloversville and Fonda areas, we see that the typical drumlins are in a belt extending from Mayfield past Gloversville and Johnstown to a few miles south of the Mohawk river. Westward of this belt is the long, bold, east-facing escarpment of the Noses fault. This is a topographical feature of such strength as materially to have retarded the westward flow of the Mohawk 32 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM ice, especially as it thinned and became weaker in its action. It seems clear then that here we have the conditions of moderate thickness and flow which give an ice sheet its capacity to model the drumlin forms by an overriding which packs and shapes the drift, but does not move it effectively to more advanced positions in its course. DRUMLOID AND LINEAR TOPOGRAPHY We include here forms of variant shape and structure which are enough like drumlins in origin and materials to deserve the des- criptive adjective drumloidal, or if referring to a single hill, drum- loid, used as a substantive. In shape these hills may be short and show the drumlin form at one end only. As examples note the trailing out from massive drift, of drumloid extensions westward, three miles northeast of Cranesville on the road to Blue Corners. Similar east-by-west drumloidal forms characterize the slope east of Fort Johnson and north of the river toward Amsterdam. The same trailing out of these hills to the westward is seen east of Stone ridge south of the Mohawk river. The forms west of Perryville banked against the Noses escarpment are partial drumlins also, but here we have the stoss rather than the lee ends of the hills. It is clear from the description of the drumlin areas in the fore- going section that hills approaching the drumlin form are found in close association with the interlobate moraine hills which did not merit distinct mapping as drumlins. This is true of the great aggre- gate of ellipsoid elevations about Barkersville and Mosherville, where the drift is thick, is shaped by overriding ice moving to the south- west, and where the proportion of drift cover to rock base in the hills is in most cases very doubtful. We can be sure there is much more drift and therefore a nearer approach to the true drumlin than is found in central New York. There, in the zone where the Mohawk and Ontario waters separate from those of the Susque- hanna, is a wide belt of heavily scored preglacial hills. They have heights above the valley bottoms of 400 to 600 feet, their irregu- larities have been smoothed by glacial erosion and glacial filling and these vast rock domes or ellipsoids veneered with a generally thin cover of till. These might well be taken as the type of the drumloid and they are as different from the true drumlin in structure and size as they are like it in form. But for the till veneer we should call them roches moutonnees and it is obvious that these bare rock forms may grade into those of the drift-mantled drumloid. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 33 In the southern halves of the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles there is an impressive exhibition of drumloids in great variety of shape and material. In general they are elongated and are appro- priate to the descriptive phrase “ linear topography,” as used by Chamberlin in his classic exposition of forty years ago. The hills are low, or low in relation to their length, and lie in an east by west direction. They may be largely of drift and thus approach the true drumlin. They may show veneers on preglacial hills and so ap- proach the central New York type. They may consist largely of shales and shaly sandstones which have been carved into the drumlin shape by the erosive action of the glacier, which has finally plastered them with till. They are therefore combined products of glacial sculpture and glacial modelling. When the rock basis was carved the erosional force was in the ascendancy. When the veneer or a more massive cover of till was laid on, the movement had weakened or the glacier had thinned and the depositional tendency prevailed. We may here have all gradations between the drumlin, pure and simple, and the drumlin with a rock nucleus, or the drumloid which is nearly all composed of soft rock. It ought to be added that in the last case we do not know to what degree the carved base of the drumloid represents preglacial erosion. Such hills consisting mostly of carved rock Fairchild has called “ rocdrumlins.” We prefer to retain the terms “ drumloid ” and “ drumloidal ” because the shapes and composition are so varied, because there are all gradations in the proportions of drift and rock, and because the term “ drumlin ” belongs to a hill of accumulation and seems less appropriate there- fore to a hill mainly shaped by glacial erosion. It is impossible to give the relative importance of these varieties in our region as it is wholly rural, sparsely populated and there has been little occasion to make excavations. Midway between Scotch Church and Mariaville a cut in the road- way crossing one of the long drumloids shows shale rock in place nearly to the crest. South of Mariaville the drumloids are very steep in their side slopes. Roads running directly across a series of them are difficult to travel, slopes of 150 to 20° being common. Long and narrow bogs in many cases run between adjacent drum- loids. Good samples of these forms are about Princetown, the church and cemetery being on the south slope of one of them. The existence and form of Mariaville pond depend upon the drumloid trends of the vicinity. This body of water is one and one-fourth miles long from east to west, lying between drumloid 2 34 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM hills. Here flowed the outlet of Featherstone lake, a small natural lake lying to the southward on the ridge between the Mohawk and Norman kill basins. About the time of the Revolutionary War this outlet was dammed for the erection of a grist mill by James Duane, owner of extensive lands in the region of the present Duanes- burg. He was a member of the Continental Congress, and of the constitutional convention. The outlet of Featherstone lake had made a small gorge about 20 feet deep and thus facilitated the building of a dam. The dam was renewed and the level raised at various times. Now there is no mill, but the State stocks the pond with fish. (Personal information from George L. Peeke of Mariaville.) The shores have now become a summer resort. Figure 26 shows the lake at its eastern end. One can hardly run amiss of these elongated hills anywhere in the southern half of either the Amsterdam or Fonda quadrangles. It is difficult to include complete profiles of these long drumloids in a photograph, but the reader will find parts of such profiles in figures 25 and 26. An inverted canoe or racing shell would repre- sent such forms, according to their length as compared with their width. The drainage pattern conforms in a striking way to the dis- position of the drift. The rock structure in the two quadrangles should give us dendritic drainage patterns, the main streams and their small affluents leading to the north or south in a digitate man- ner. We find instead a prevailing east or west flow of the minor or head streams. With an entirely different cause or condition, we get a resemblance to the trellised drainage of some mountain regions. Figure 14 shows a section of the Fonda quadrangle with the drainage in heavy lines. Outside of the area here shown, these waters find their way northward to the Mohawk or southward to the Schoharie and Cobleskill creeks. We must now observe that this belt of glacially shaped drainage extends far westward beyond our area. In the Canajoharie quad- rangle north of the Montgomery county line, the prevailing topo- graphic axes are parallel to the Mohawk river, with a west-northwest direction. The same trends of hills and stream reappear on the Richfield Springs quadrangle, north of Warren and Richfield Springs and in a striking manner about Jordanville. The same conditions continue as far west as Cedarville and Cedarville Station. It will be at once inferred that this westward extension of linear forms will be found significant in relation to the extent of the Mohawk lobe. There is a further significance in the fact that we find the long, low drumloids prevailing in the Amsterdam, Fonda and Canajoharie GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 35 quadrangles, and the true drumlins developing in the Richfield Springs and Winfield areas. This contrast as we go westward points to the greater thickness and moving power of the Mohawk lobe in its eastern parts than in its western section, where it was thinner, narrower and more remote from the vigorous push in the Hudson- Champlain-St Lawrence valleys. GLACIATED ROCK BENCHES The surfaces of drumlins and of rock hills of drumloid form are in many cases fluted or show what we may call ellipsoid moldings. Where glaciated hills are built of horizontal beds of sedimentary rock the designation “ rock benches ” becomes appropriate. Such hills may have developed benches by the preglacial weathering of the more and the less resistant strata. In that case the overriding glacier smooths off the angles and frequently develops the elliptical profile. Or the glacier itself may be wholly responsible for the differential erosion of the variant beds. These benches may be covered with soil and drift or they may show more or less exposed ledges of the bed rock. It is obvious that these benches are closely related to the drumloidal forms described in the last section. This relation includes both the shapes, the structure and the agent pro- ducing the forms. Conspicuous examples occur on both the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles, especially in the southern parts of both areas, where the edges of sandstone beds, bevelled off by long ages of preglacial erosion, face the valley and make up its higher slopes. We first note, however, an example north of the river, on the north slope of the hills south and east of the village of Glenville (fig. 27). Benches are strongly developed on the north slopes below the Princetown triangulation station, also in the north slopes of the hill Adebahr, where the fluting is conspicuous but the fields are beautifully green and fertile. Other examples are south and west of Scotch Church and on the hills west of Minaville, where the westward moving ice would crowd against the north-facing slopes. Many of these benches are found on the steep slopes of Schoharie creek in the towns of Glen and Charleston. Figure 3 shows the profile of such benches on the great hill north- west of Burtonsville, as seen from the northwest. These strong benches, having heights of 40 to 70 feet, are on the slopes of a short valley rising westward, one mile north of Burtonsville. Similar rock benches are well seen at Carytown, with escarpments of 10 to 30 feet, and the bedding floor left very smooth. There is in some places a 36 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM dip slope from the top of one escarpment to the base of the one above it, with obstructed drainage in the trough. Such a swamp is found one mile west of Carytown and another a mile farther west, each in an angle south of the intersection of two roads. Further examples with scoured shelves of drumloid shape occur near Charleston, also on the slopes between Esperance and Sloans- ville, and on the southwest slope of the valley leading from Sloans- ville northwest toward Charleston Four Corners. We may perhaps safely say that these linear, or axial lines, due to glacial movements, whether seen in the drumlins, drumloids or rock benches in the field, or on the contoured map, are the most widespread feature in the area which is the subject of this study. Figure 3 Profile of the great hill northwest of Burtonsville. Slightly dipping sandstone beds benched by strong glacial action and slightly covered with till. Seen from the northwest. ^ T“ J THE LIMITS OF THE MOHAWK GLACIAL LOBE To determine with precision the extent of the Mohawk ice would require much detailed study outside of our area, in regions lying southward and westward, where only general observation has been possible. We can, however, assure ourselves with a fair degree of security as to the general outline of the belt in which a westward moving body of ice was dominant. We can not better enter on such a discussion than by reproducing the diagnosis which, with keenness of perception, was made by Cham- berlin more than forty years ago, concerning ice movements in east- ern New York. He suggests : Massive ice currents having their ulterior channels in the Cham- plain valley on the one hand, and the St Lawrence on the other, swept around the Adirondacks and entered the Mohawk valley at either extremity, while a feebler current, at the height of glaciation, probably, passed over the Adirondacks and gave to the whole a southerly trend (Chamberlin ’83, p. 360-65). It does not seem possible even in the light of later investigation to make a better statement. In Chamberlin’s view, ice, rounding the mountain mass on the west, being a branch of the St Lawrence-Ontario lobe, was pushed up the Black river valley, crossed the divide at its head and came down the Mohawk valley to Little Falls. This view of Black river GLACIAL GEOLOGY OP THE LOWER MOHAWK 37 and upper Mohawk flowage has been sustained by Miller (’09) in his studies of the region. We may now emphasize Chamber- lin’s suggestion of a “feebler current,” crossing the Adirondacks dur- ing that maximum glaciation in which the ice flowed across New York into Pennsylvania. This view of the moderate effectiveness of the Adirondack flow is sustained by various later observers and it is emphasized by the fact that there is a difference of opinion as to whether the ice ever rose above and crossed over the higher Adiron- dacks summits. Figure 4 Map showing the location of the Mohawk glacial lobe. We do know therefore how soon or to what degree the south- western flow diverted and controlled the early westward flow through the Mohawk depression. We can not be sure that the massive and thick ice moving from the east did not continue to exert effective pressure towards the west and control the movement at least of the bottom currents in the Mohawk region. In like manner we may surmise that in the waning of the ice, the Adirondack flow weakened rather rapidly and left the Mohawk un- NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 38 hindered by its thrust. In any case we know that the Mohawk lobe pursued its work freely for a long period, for this is fully demon- strated by the sculpture and modeling of the land forms as seen in our four quadrangles. We have also given some evidence that Mohawk ice was effective later than the Adirondack ice of the Sacandaga valley. We have seen that south of our area in the Berne and Schoharie quadrangles and westward, the flow was to the southwest. We can not be sure without further study that these gravings represent the maximum flow from the Adirondacks. They may mark a fanning out of the Mohawk lobe, that is, an axi-radiant activity exercised on its southern side. If the latter is true, the southwestern maximum flow gradually changed to the axi-radiant flow as the ice melted from the great plateau which stretches southward. In a preliminary report dealing especially with the region south and west of our area, the writer made the following general statement (To, p. 18) which he now sees no reason to change: The designation, Mohawk lobe, is of somewhat indefinite applica- tion, because the lobe was a part of the waning ice sheet and there is no complete boundary so marked by topographic features, glacial or otherwise, as to create a sharply definable stage deserving this name. Certain features, nevertheless, point to a reasonable dif- ferentiation of a glacier within the Mohawk Valley, and overlapping to some distance upon the headwaters region of the Susquehanna. The same preliminary report gives the following data concerning the southern border of the Mohawk glacier: On the south the place of bifurcation between the Hudson and Mohawk lobes may be confidently placed at the northern end of the bolder development of the Helderberg escarpment, in the Berne quadrangle, west and southwest of Altamont. This was inferred from an inspection of the contours of the map and is abundantly borne out in the field. [At a later time before seeing the author’s preliminary' notice, here quoted, Professor John L. Rich (’14) made a similar interpretation of the topographical maps.] In the southeastern parts of the quadrangle the movement was south. In the northwestern section the direction was nearly west, and in the central and southeastern parts around the village of Berne, the direc- tion of striae is intermediate. There is a sharp alignment of drum- loid forms in the east and north which does not prevail in the intermediate, or southwest direction, pointing to the more prolonged and heavy scorings of the Mohawk and Hudson lobes. Following, and also taken from the author’s earlier report, we have the rock records of one place in the region of divergence : About one and one-half miles west of Altamont the exposed slopes which were subject either to Hudson or Mohawk movements, show interesting striae ranging from S io° E, to W. On one surface GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 39 are striae S 50 E crossed by another set having the direction S 30° to 350 W. Another surface has two sets, one S 5° to io° W, the other west. These records point to an alternating or conflicting con- trol at the very point of differentiation, as determined by the strong northward end of the Helderberg front. Going westward, the same preliminary report has the following statement as to a possible belt of moraines marking the southern border of the lobe. We must regard this statement only as tentative and suggestive : There is, however, a significant development of moraines which may in a general way mark the southwest border of the lobe, and may probably be contemporaneous with the Gloversville moraine. These moraines occur near the headwaters of Cobleskill creek near junction with the Susquehanna; along the lower sections of Elk creek valley and Cherry Valley, and along the Susquehanna from Cooperstown to Portlandville. It is significant that a day’s drive among the strong hills between Cooperstown and Westford led to the finding of but one locality of striae, showing a remarkably con- tinuous sheeting of ground moraine for such topography. The possible inference from such an area of massive drift in this situation is that it may be a latero-terminal product of the Mohawk glacier. If the last glacial activity on this northern edge of the high plateau grounds was that of the maximum flow over the state, we might expect these uplands to be more or less denuded of drift. The subject needs to be cleared up by detailed field observation. The moraines above noted could hardly mark the continuous south edge of a coherent Mohawk glacier, but may have been deposited at the ends of still active valley tongues protruding from the Mohawk trunk ice. They would be like the Finger lake extensions of Ontarian ice, or those long extensions of central New York ice up the Oneida, Oriskany and Sauquoit valleys. These more western ice extensions, however, reached only to the vicinity of the southern water partings, while some of the ice tongues here named stretched well over the Mohawk-Susquehanna divide southward. On the north side of the Mohawk lobe we have traced a well- defined border nearly across our two northern quadrangles. The possible westward extension of this moraine awaits determination by study in the Lassellsville and Little Falls quadrangles. The section on the interlobate moraine has a brief reference to some morainic belts in these areas. Whatever obscurity remains as to the borders of the Mohawk ice, no one who observes the striae and the drumloid and linear forms of the axial belt can doubt its presence and vigorous action. 40 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM These have been outlined but may here be again summarized for the quadrangles which are wholly or in part south of the Mohawk river. We have the southern parts of the Amsterdam and Fonda areas, the Canajoharie area southward nearly to Sharon Springs, the Richfield Springs quadrangle to Springfield and the village of Richfield Springs and a well-developed area in the northeastern quarter of the Winfield quadrangle. The western limit is around Cedarville a few miles southeast of Utica. West of this locality the dominant lines of the topography run north and south. If one stands on the high points of the Cherry valley turnpike between Sharon Springs and Cherry Valley, he will command a remarkable view of the deep and wide Mohawk gap. Almost as from mountain heights he will see the fields and forests of this great valley, with a long and rugged Adirondack horizon far to the north. The more assured field of Mohawk glaciation is plotted in figure 4. PROOFS OF WESTWARD MOVEMENT The axi-radiant pattern of glacial striae in the valley admits of no other interpretation than that the ice moved from east to west. Many years ago the present observer reported from a locality in the east end of the city of Amsterdam a graved surface from which a thin slab had been plucked, with such relation to the scar on the bed rock, that only a westward moving force could have dislodged it (Brig- ham, ’98, p. 194). Figure 5 is a reproduction of the diagram there used. The east by west striae and linear forms around Cedarville head against a district of north and south lines, showing that two ice cur- rents of differing sources and directions came into conflict with each other in central New York, GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF TrIE LOWER MOHAWK 41 We have also noted the trailing out westward of drumlins and drumloid forms and the fact that a good number of drumlins show morainic and bouldery surfaces on their lower slopes at their eastern ends. These conditions also are corroborative of the westward move- ment. The same conclusion is enforced by certain facts in the distribu- tion of erratics. If the glacier had made, in its most effective stage, a direct course across the Mohawk valley from the Adirondacks, the boulders would have been both larger and more numerous in all parts of the valley. We cite the paucity of erratics between Johns- town and Fonda and west to Sammonsville, also in the belt of terri- tory from Minaville to Mill Point. We can be sure that almost everywhere in our region, with an Adirondack flow predominating, the Precambrian boulders would have been much more common. It may be added that in sections of till west of Hoffman Ferry are many boulders plucked from the uplifted and exposed rocks of the Hoffman fault. One of the most convincing evidences of westward movement is found in the depositional and sculptural activity of the glacier in crossing the Schoharie valley. Here we quote from a preliminary report 'by the author (’07, p. 23) : A still more striking confirmation is found in connection with the Schoharie valley. On the east side of the lower Schoharie within this district, the drift is a very massive till and outcrops of the bed rock are almost absent. In fact that section of the Schoharie valley from Esperance to Fort Hunter was filled with till to a remarkable extent and the postglacial excavations by the stream have produced a singularly interesting series of topographic forms normal to river action. On the west side of the Schoharie, on the contrary, out- crops of the bed rock are everywhere present, the drift is very thin, ledges and glaciated benches are frequent and the region gives every evidence of having been powerfully scored. These conditions as between east and west are exactly what would be expected from a westward moving glacier, passing over the hills in the neighborhood of Minaville, dumping and filling in the valley transverse to its course and driving powerfully against the edges of the exposed strata west of the stream, cleaning away the drift and giving the whole topography a characteristic glacial expression. DEPTH OF THE ICE We may visualize the Hudson ice lobe over Saratoga Springs, Troy and Albany. On the west diverged the strong movement up the Mohawk valley. The Hudson river at Troy and Albany is at sea level. The plateau about Cedarville, where the Mohawk flow 42 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM seems to have terminated, is about 1600 feet in altitude. Whatever thickness the glacier must have had over the Hudson, in order to push into central New York, we may divide into three components, as follows: (a) the difference in altitude; ( b ) the total inclination of the surface of the ice within the distance from the Hudson to Cedarville, or West Winfield — about 80 miles; (c) the thickness at its terminal or distal end of a glacier which could be active across a hilly region. For (a) we have 1600 feet. For ( b ) we will assume a surface slope of 20 feet a mile (compare antevs ’28, p. 64, 65), which gives us 1600 feet. For (c) we must regard 500 feet as a moderate estimate. This would give us a thickness of the ice of 3700 feet in the Albany-Troy region. We may take another example that is comparable in magnitude. The Ontarian ice, filling and crossing the Mohawk valley at Utica, rose from 400 feet of altitude there, traversed a plateau 2000 feet above sea and reached southward about 125 miles, from central New York into northern Pennsylvania. Computing in the same manner, we get a thickness of 5000 feet of ice above the present level of the Mohawk river at Utica. It must be remembered that this represents the earlier maximum flow across New York and antedated the Mohawk ice which we now have under observation. The case is not so simple, however, as the above computations might make it appear. In the first place let us consider the topo- graphic obstacles which stood in the way of the westward movement of Mohawk ice. Most of the territory occupied was ruggedly hilly. At the doorway of the Mohawk there stood, as there stand today, masses of high hills, the altitudes being about 1000 feet and 1400 feet respectively near the Van Etten and Waterstreet triangulation stations, north and south of the Mohawk, in the Amsterdam quadrangle. The imposing valley which now carries out the Mohawk river between these hills, runs athwart the movement of the Mohawk ice, as it was turning westward, and this valley was of little import- ance in admitting the ice current into the major Mohawk depression. The same minor role was played as we go west, by the narrow and crooked inner trough of the river. It would seem that at a number of points the general Mohawk flow must have sheared across the ice of the sinuous trough below. This involves friction and con- sumption of the energy by means of which the ice was driven west- ward. These physical difficulties in the way of a westward flow might require a higher estimate of the thickness of the ice in the Hudson valley. A further element of doubt is in our assumption of 20 feet as the average surface inclination a mile, which may have been less or GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 43 greater, involving in either case a modification of our figures. Taylor (’03, p. 348), in connection with his studies of glacial conditions in the Berkshire region, gives as his conclusion that, “ The average slope along the side of the Hudson lobe, regardless of the tongues and reentrants, is something between 25 and 30 feet per mile.” If this figure should be more nearly correct than that of 20 feet adopted above, the thickness of the Mohawk ice would be very considerably increased. We see no reason to believe that conditions of flowage could have been more favorable in the Mohawk than in the Hudson valley. Indeed the contrary seems more probably true. Again, Taylor, considering the Great lakes lobe of the Wisconsin invasion, takes as a base the line running from the northeast corner of the driftless area in Wisconsin to the tip of the ice-free salient at Salamanca, N. Y. The apex of the lobe was in Indiana or Illinois, 400 miles from the base. The base line, from Wisconsin to Sala- manca, was 600 miles long. Taylor figures the average descent of the ice surface from base to apex at about 11 feet a mile but says immediately that this is almost surely an underestimate (Leverett and Taylor ’15, p. 511). If now a lobe of such size, flowing over a region mainly of low relief, must probably have had a slope of more than 1 1 feet a mile, we are making a highly conservative estimate in assuming 20 feet, for, in the Champlain and Hudson-Mohawk region, we have strong relief and valleys with rugged flanks as a zone of movement for the ice. On the basis of 3700 feet of ice along the Hudson and a westward surface slope of 20 feet a mile, we should find 2800 feet of ice over the river level at Amsterdam. We gain this figure by allowing for the decline of the glacial surface going westward and the rise of the valley floor above tide level. Estimating by the same method, the southern heights of the Amsterdam quadrangle would have carried 1700 feet of ice. When we consider that the glacier moved nearly 50 miles farther west over a rugged region, this estimate seems too low. We may check our estimates of thickness by going along the track of the Hudson valley glacier northward. The greater body of opinion is that all Adirondack heights, including Mount Marcy, were covered by the ice at its height. Coleman (’26, p. 51, 52) dissents from this view and regards 4500 feet as proved for that region. If there were but 4500 feet so far north, in the height of glaciation there would seem to have been much less in that stage of decline in which the Champlain-Hudson and Mohawk valleys held differentiated 44 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM lobes of ice. The thickness of the Champlain ice would not have been enough to allow any slope southward to a 3700-foot glacier at Albany. Our own problem therefore leads us toward the acceptance of the higher estimates of thickness for the ice of northern New York and New England. Kemp and Ailing estimate the surface slope to be 25 feet and they conclude that there may have been 6500 feet in the Ausable region (’25, p. 72). This is the thickness which, with a 25-foot slope, would permit the ice to reach New York City. Ac- ceptance of these figures would give us almost exactly 3600 feet of ice in or near the present site of Albany. The submergence of the Adirondacks is unequivocally accepted by H. L. Ailing (Kemp ’20, p. 62, 64). In the reference cited Ailing quotes estimates of 8500 to 12,000 feet as necessary to afford a gradient with which the ice could have flowed thence to New York City. Fairchild also holds that the Adirondacks were completely covered. The Green Mountains including Mount Mansfield were submerged by ice currents deep enough to sweep diagonally across the range to the southeast. Submergence is held as unquestionable for Mount Washington by Professor Goldthwait (’25, p. 13). For further evidence that great depths of ice must have engulfed the Adirondacks, we may return to our estimate of 5000 feet of ice over Utica. Adding 400 feet for the altitude of the Mohawk river at that point we have an ice surface 5400 feet above tide. Utica is about 95 miles from Mount Marcy. Again computing slope of ice surface at 20 feet a mile, we get 1900 feet, or a requirement of ice surface over Mount Marcy at 7300 feet above sea level. Summarizing now the several conditions relative to the thickness and flow of the Mohawk lobe and its northern source of supply, we note as follows : The axial length of the Champlain-Hudson-Mohawk ice current from the Champlain valley east of Mount Marcy, by way of the Saratoga Springs-Albany region, to Cedarville, in Herkimer county, is 150 miles. The altitude of the plateau about Cedarville is 1600 feet. The thickness of the ice postulated at or near its front is 500 feet. The slope of the ice surface is taken at 20 feet a mile. The total slope of ice surface from the latitude of Mount Marcy to Cedarville is 3000 feet. We require therefore 5100 feet of ice in the middle Champlain region. This is probably an underestimate because the frictional retarda- tion of a narrow flow through rough country would seem to require GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 45 a far greater inclination of ice surface than Leverett and Taylor assume for the Great lakes lobe. According to the isobases of Fairchild (T8), the post glacial uplift or upward warping toward the north amounts to 250 feet between the Albany region and the mid-Champlain or Mount Marcy latitude. This strengthens our conclusion that very massive ice in the Champlain valley was needed to force a glacial lobe upon high ground in central New York. If our conclusion as to the thickness of the later ice streams is valid, it forces us to an important inference concerning the ice recession in northeastern New York. The view has been widely accepted that the Adirondack area in the later stages of ice occupa- tion became an island, a sort of gigantic nunatak, nearly free from the invader, but surrounded by active ice. This view is not tenable if we must have 5000 feet of ice or more in the Champlain valley, while the Mohawk glacier was existent and active. Light is thrown on this problem by an inspection of a relief map of the Adirondack region. Only a small fraction even of its inner and central uplands has altitudes above 3000 feet. Not half of the Precambrian surface is above 2000 feet (Miller, T7, fig. 4). It is obvious that 5000 feet of ice in the middle Champlain region and more than 3000 feet in the middle Hudson valley are inconsistent with ice-free surfaces of any great extent in the Adirondacks. This view does not destroy the reality of ice streams flowing around the mountain area, but it suggests the diminished activity or actual stagnation of the ice fields that must have remained in Adiron- dack territory. Here we recall and emphasize Chamberlin’s “feebler flow” across the mountains when they were finally submerged. The flow weakened with the progress of the final ablation, much of the ice became stagnant or flowed only in favorable situations. Such a situation was along the Sacandaga at the north border of our area, where the valley offered a low gap leading out of the mountains. Another favorable situation is perhaps found in the North Creek quadrangle where Professor Miller has reported the rather surprising southward alignment of the glacial striae. In this connection there is especial significance in a summary state- ment by Dr I. H. Ogilvie (’05, p. 470). Of the Adirondacks as a whole it is stated that “the general direction of ice movement was to- ward the southwest, that the motion was vigorous among the outlying lower hills, but that among the higher mountains the ice was stagnant in the bottoms of the deep valleys, while at the time of the maximum 46 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM extension of the ice sheet it passed over the tops of these filled valleys smoothing the mountain summits. It was further shown that the glacial deposits belonged in general to the time of retreat and melting of the ice, being largely of stratified material.” These statements are quite in harmony with the supposition that as the ice began to wane there was a gradual thinning in the moun- tains and a progressive loss of activity. At the same time the ice was maintained at relatively high levels, and around this body of ample but decadent ice the valley currents continued to move in great depth and strength. We must not ignore the fact that in all stages of glaciation the Adirondack area was a theater of storms and falling snows and therefore a feeding ground for the ice along the southern slopes of the region. Some contribution of Canadian ice, with added supplies of local origin, and the prolonged preservation of drift- mantled ice in the valleys, helped maintain high levels when vigorous action had been abated in the central areas. THICKNESS OF THE DRIFT The drift is highly variable in amount, ranging from massive de- posits on some of the lower grounds to a bare veneer on some higher i and more exposed surfaces. There are two great east and west belts of thick drift. Along the Mohawk river heavy deposits prevail on the north side from the Noses to Hoffman Ferry, with a width of one to two miles from the stream. Bed rock may occur at the base of the valley wall, as east of Fonda, at Tribes Hill and at Amsterdam, the drift rising abruptly as a massive shoulder on the north. Sections may be seen where streams from the north lead down to the Mohawk, as above Fort Johnson where the drift is 60 to loo feet thick. Above Kellogg’s dam in Amsterdam is heavy till with some exposures of 50 to 60 feet. Similar conditions appear on the road from Manny’s Corners to the river and in the Cranesville gorge. The valley at Cranesville is a preglacial trough, mature at the north, clogged with drift to the south and deeply trenched by the present stream. Most of the fill is on the east side, a massive shoulder, whose drift is 150 feet in thickness, much exposed along the creek. Heavy drift appears in several sections, in the city of Amsterdam and above the electric railway from Cranesville to Hoffman Ferry and beyond. On the south side of the Mohawk massive drift appears from Fort Hunter to Port Jackson. Yankee Hill cut and other excavations in Port Jackson show very heavy drift. Three miles east of Port Jack- son a stream heading on the north of the hill Adebahr enters the GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 47 Mohawk. Here is a most impressive gorge, cut ioo feet or more in solid till and marked by many landslips. Above Pattersonville along the slopes of Sandsea kill, is an enor- mous mass of ground moraine, left in a preglacial valley leading down to the Mohawk. The till is more than ioo feet thick and rises in great shoulders more than 500 feet above the river. The second zone of thick drift within our area runs from the escarpment of the Noses fault at Clip hill eastward. It takes in the cities of Johnstown and Gloversville, the areas around Broadalbin and Perth, extends eastward to West Galway and the Amsterdam reservoir, and northeast by Hagadorn’s Mills and Barkersville to the eastern edge of the Broadalbin quadrangle. It is the belt of the in- terlobate moraine already described. One might travel the entire distance of 25 miles and not pass an outcrop of bed rock. If along some roads there were exceptions they would be near some stream. In all this belt our map shows not a single example cf glacial stria- tion and this is true northward over the marshes of the Sacandaga and southward well toward the Mohawk river. The masking of the rock surface is, for a region bordered by mountains and plateaus, re- markably complete. There is also very thick drift along the Schoharie creek from Fort Hunter to Esperance, accumulated in the trough as the Mohawk glacier moved across it westward. A remaining region of thick drift is along Norman kill, eastward of Duanesburg. Two miles east of this village is a great cut along the railway, north of Norman kill, showing heavy till with many boulders. East of Kelly’s Station on the south side of the stream are banks of till 60 to 80 feet in height. In several parts of our area the drift is thin and outcrops are com- mon. This is true along Chuctenunda creek from Amsterdam to Rockton and Hagaman and in the region around Manny’s Corners. It is only partly true of the Adirondack areas north of Gloversville, and both west and east of the great southward loup of the Sacandaga river. The drift is patchy in these high grounds — thin here and thick there. Thin drift prevails on the high and rather even surfaces west of the Noses fault from Yosts northward for several miles. South of the Mohawk river in the Amsterdam quadrangle the drift is deep to Scotch Bush and Scotch Church, but thinner to the southward on the sandstone heights which occupy most of the southern third of the quadrangle. Thin drift prevails on the high ground throughout the southern half of the Fonda quadrangle. It was heavily scored and is almost free of morainic accumulations and is marked everywhere by long drumloidal hills, which show a very constant veneer of drift. 48 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM The map does not give a complete showing of rock outcrops or glacial striae. These features appear on the map more often near the roads. The observer is more apt to see them there, and the cuts and rain wash along the highways tend to uncover bed rock surfaces. Estimates of the average thickness of the drift can be little more than guesses. Considering the important belts of thick deposits in our area, I do not regard 30 feet as an excessive figure, if we imagine all the drift evenly spread over the surfaces of the bed rock. ERRATICS The drift boulders show as usual the predominance of fragments from the bed rocks of the locality. Thus in the vicinity of the Adirondack mountains they are of ancient, or Precambrian types. Toward the Mohawk river, limestones abound in the drift, and on the southern heights of the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles sandstones prevail. The greater number and larger sizes of boulders occur as would be expected in and near the mountain lands in the north of our area. This increase in abundance and bulk can be well seen as one goes out of Gloversville northward and proceeds toward Mountain lake. As far away from the mountains as along the road leading from Broadalbin to West Perth the boulders are nearly all crystal- line. Going south from Sacandaga Park along the road west of Tamarack swamp, the boulders are so thick in some fields that one might almost step from one to another. They run in size from three to ten feet, with now and then specimens having dimensions of 15 to 20 feet. Around Barkersville are conspicuous fields of boulders, among many others in the northern region. One-fourth mile south of Sacandaga Park Station, west of the railroad crossing and extending along the railroad, is a field of boulders which were washed from the till on the west shore of the Sacandaga (glacial) lake. It is such a field of washed erratics as may now be seen on many New England beaches. In the eastern part of Amsterdam between Main street and the New York Central Railway is a field of medium-sized boulders washed out from the local till by the Iroquois waters (fig. 51). Around Manny’s Corners and eastward and east of Hagaman, is a region of thin drift and many limestone outcrops, and limestone slabs are abundant in the drift and many have been built into walls about the fields. The till sections, which are numerous from Fort Johnson eastward to Amsterdam and beyond, show many boulders. This condition may in part arise from the exposures of bed rock of GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 49 the Hoffman uplift, lying in the track of the westward movement of the Mohawk glacier. The erratics are less abundant on the south side of the Mohawk river, although large crystalline boulders occur. Two such frag- ments, five by seven feet in size, are found by the road a short dis- tance southward from Fultonville. About half way from Mill Point to Glen below the road on a slope facing northeast is a gneissoid boulder whose dimensions are 21, 15 and 10 feet. These boulders could not have come directly south from the Adirondacks athwart the westward flow of the Mohawk lobe. They must have come from the eastern Adirondacks by way of the Champlain-Hudson ice and were then carried around into the Mohawk depression. Some of the till sections south of the Mohawk show many boulders, as for example rising from tbe valley level south of Fort Hunter. There are few erratics on the Princetown hills, those present being angular sandstones. On the contrary, the fields show many boulders for two miles north of the church at Duanesburg, one six-foot crystalline being seen. Rather unaccountably we find one and one-half miles northwest of Carlisle, near the Cherry valley turn- pike, stone walls with many crystallines, some being of large size. North of Little York, west of Carlisle, is a limestone boulder 30 feet in length. MINOR MORAINIC AREAS Brief reference may be here made to several small bodies of morainic drift, of till or of washed materials. Several of these were sufficiently described as belonging to the recession of the Sacandaga glacier. As appears from the map, patches and belts of morainic till are common on the lower grounds of the mountainous parts of the two northern quadrangles. Northeastward from Yosts station is a small group of kames between Briggs run and the Noses escarpment. It was a natural position for the retardation and melting of a west-moving mass of waning ice, with stagnation, water action and kame formation. These hills lie at the west end of the Fonda wash plain and are seen from the New York Central Railway. Small bodies of kames and of till moraine are found on the eastern border of our district, in the southeast parts of the Broadal- bin quadrangle and the eastern part of the Amsterdam quadrangle. They seem to be products of recession where the ice had largely retired from the Mohawk valley but was still present in some depth in the Hudson valley north of Schenectady. 50 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM An area of kames covering ground perhaps two square miles in extent lies around Glenville. To the east are smaller kame hills, and northward also near West Charlton. It will be observed that from Glenville the Crabb kill leads out over comparatively low ground to Alplaus kill in the Schenectady quadrangle. High hills rise between Crabb kill and the Mohawk river. The lower ground here seems to have admitted an overflow from the Hudson valley ice, a short, broad tongue maintained long enough to make these re- cessional accumulations. A fairly defined spillway leads southward from these kames into the Mohawk valley trough. South of the Mohawk river both the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles are remarkably free from terminal accumulations. The observer, watchful for such features, is greeted everywhere by the flowing and blending curves of the ground moraine, molded into drumloid forms. Two small areas of moraine till are recognized on the map, near Oak ridge and Burtonsville. If there were, as may be possible, morainic accumulations, or the ice-contact slopes of kame terraces, along the Mohawk river, they have been almost completely disguised by water-laid drift or cut away by the powerful stream that long swept through the valley. So far as one may judge from an inspection of the topographic maps and from some field observations, the Canajoharie, Richfield Springs and Winfield quadrangles offer the same types of surface that we have noted south of Amsterdam and Fonda. We are re- ferring to the parts of those quadrangles which were specially affected by the Mohawk glacier. SAND PLAINS The physiographer applies the term “sand plain” to a flat-topped body of washed drift of the nature of a delta laid down in waters which were retained by walls of glacial ice. We have several examples in the Broadalbin quadrangle. We take first a typical form of this nature lying west of the village of Edinburg. It is more than a mile across in any direction and rises from the 900-foot level to a maximum altitude of about ic6o feet. The thickness of the water- laid material is thus 160 feet. Butler creek has cut the sand plain into two parts. Horizontal stratification appears near the top of the plain by the road bridge one mile above Edinburg. The top is very smooth and is bordered by a steep bluff on the south and east. At the base of the bluff is a very abrupt transition to till. The hills to the north and west had become free of ice, and the Sacandaga valley was still clogged with the glacier, which, as it melted on the west, GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK SI opened a temporary basin for a small lake, which filled with the wash from the higher slopes. The stream continued to flow across the plain, and has dug the bisecting gorge which the contours of the map very well show. At the north end of the village of Northville a flat-topped body of washed drift rises 54 feet above the terrace on which the village stands. Apparently the ice occupied the valleys on either side and merged in a common flow over the site of the village and southward. At the south end of the ridge, where the ice streams joined, was a natural place for melting, for an ice-bound pond and for sedimenta- tion. Another small example has been referred to in our account of the Sacandaga glacier, number 6 of the list of forms on the hillside one mile southeast of Northville (see page 28). A well-developed marginal sand plain rises a half mile east of the village of Benedict. The plain has been bisected by Hans creek. According to the contours the south section is lower than the one on the north, but the hook-shaped extension at its west end rises toward the north in a way not shown by the map. We have conditions like those at Edinburg, a glacier in the lowland melting on its eastern edge, holding a small body of water between itself and the hills and receiving sediment. The delta extended eastward from its present limit and has been cut in two parts as at Edinburg. A similar case occurs below Hagadorns Mills, the two sections be- ing separated by Kenneatto creek. In Mayfield village we have morainic conditions with a flat plain stretching south and west. It is not a sand plain built in glacially impeded waters but appears to be an outwash plain in front of the retiring glacier. It is of interest to compare the altitudes of three of the above plains, each of which has been built and later bisected by a small stream. The Edinburg plain rises 1060 feet, or possibly 1070 feet. The Benedict plain is at 860 feet and the plain below Hagadorns Mills stands at 980 feet. Here are variations aggregating 200 feet or more within a distance of ten miles. The altitudes are not serially arranged, and if they were the northward warping is insufficient within the distance to bring them into harmony. The inference is that the plains indicate local conditions and are not referable to a large body of water. GLACIAL LAKE SACANDAGA This name is given to a body of water which occupied the depres- sion now known as the Great Vly and extended over many square miles of land which is now outside of the marshes and remote from 52 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM them. The water of the lake was held in place by the massive drift in the region of the interlobate moraine and by the receding ice of the Sacandaga region in the vicinity of Batchellerville and Conkiing- ville. The deposits of the Vly are sediments of this lake overlain by accumulations of vegetable remains. The most important and best formed delta of our region of study was built in this lake by the waters of the Sacandaga glacier issuing near Northville. Most of Northville village stands upon a flat table which is a fragment of this delta. The delta can be traced about a mile north of Northville, heading against a great recessional moraine. South of Northville it has been dissected by the river and partially removed. There are remnants on the east side of the Sacandaga, as at Northville, but the preserved delta surfaces are mostly west of the river. One mile northwest of Northville the river road on the west bank rises to the head of the delta at an altitude of 800 feet. The surface material to a depth of three or four feet is coarse and bouldery such as we should expect to find in this situation. North of this the road cuts through higher gravels and sands of kame structure. Across the river is a massive group of kames showing washed materials to the top, which is 125 feet above the river. There is a fragment of the delta head on the east side of the river, reaching northward from the site of the village. Thus we have on both sides of the river a strong moraine, which was a recessional front of the ice and is a definite northern limit of the outwash at that stage. This group of kames is not adequately shown on the topographic map. The terrace upon which Northville stands is very smooth and is above 780 feet, with the Sacandaga river on the west and a small stream on the east. The Northville terrace is about one-half by three-fourths of a mile in extent. Structure sections on the edges and slopes of this platform show sands and pebbly gravels, some- times ill sorted, sometimes well stratified. In all the sections seen, however, the stratification is approximately horizontal. A narrow remnant of the delta extends southward about one and one-half miles on the east side of the river. West of the river the delta forms the recreation grounds of Sacandaga Park. Thence it extends southward four miles, its southern border being as far south as the village of Cranberry Creek, but not reaching so far westward. At Osborn Bridge the delta is 25 feet above the flood plain of the river, its surface is very flat and the material is fine silt. The road from Northampton to Cranberry Creek crosses the south end of the delta for about two miles. At one GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF TFIE LOWER MOHAWK 53 point it passes over a small hill of till which is inclosed in the delta sediments. Other till belts lying partly in the delta silts are found toward Cranberry Creek and near Osborn Bridge. The southern part of the delta has an altitude slightly over 760 feet. The greater part of the delta, or its upper beds, has been removed by the river for a distance of three miles from Northville to Osborn Bridge. For two miles south of Northville the river has cut away the delta silts and made a flood plain averaging a mile in width. South of this is a quadrilateral area about a mile in dimension which is an abandoned flood plain, now a river terrace. It is uneven and boul- dery in parts. This is due to the sorting of the delta materials by the river currents. There is a well-defined back channel of the river at this earlier and higher stage. It is possible that the lake included a body of shallow water where now Tamarack swamp is found. This appears if we observe that lake sediments rise to about 800 feet in Sacandaga Park and that Cranberry creek issues from the swamp at or near 780-foot level. Thus the higher land running from south of Sacandaga Park to the village of Cranberry Creek may have been an island. Kenneatto creek comes out of the hills a mile and a half east of Munsonville. We follow the creek almost to Vail Mills and turn westward up the small Skinner creek to its upper course on the edge of the Gloversville quadrangle. West of this headwater a small stream flows west-southwest to the Cayudutta creek in Johns- town. The divide between these two small streams appears to have been the outlet of Lake Sacandaga (fig. 28). The altitude of this water parting is about 780 feet. West of it for one and a half miles is a well-defined channel 10 to 15 rods wide, flat, boggy, with well-defined edges and bearing in some places washed-out boulders (figs. 29 and 30). The present stream is quite inadequate to these results and indeed does no appreciable work. Farther down, the valley is narrow, the old channel less well defined and the fall is greater. The lower slopes of the drumlins look as if eroded a long time ago, so that the steep cut banks are softened and subdued. This result would have come about rapidly and early, considering the sandy nature of the till in this region. If the evidence of a fairly large stream flowing to the Cayudutta in glacial time is not striking, the conditions do not forbid that supposition. We have to consider also that glacial “floods” so called, carrying water from melting glaciers, may be torrential but are not so wide and deep in fact as they have been in the popular imagination. From the divide past Vail Mills to its entrance on the Vly, near Munson- 54 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM ville, the valley was filled with a narrow and irregular southward arm of the lake waters. The discrepancy between the higher levels of the delta near North- ville at about 800 feet and the outlet at a little under 780 feet is quite precisely accounted for by the differential uplift or warping which has affected the northeastern region since the time of Pleistocene submergence (Fairchild, ’18, pi. 3 and 9). Including the southern arm which led to its outlet, the lake was about 15 miles long. It came into existence as the front of the ice receded north- ward from the interlobate moraine and grew in extent with the different stages of recession, until a long stand of the ice front was made in the valley above Northville. In similar fashion a long eastern arm of the lake extended to the ice front indicated by the moraines north of Edinburg and Batchellerville. The lake reached westward toward Mayfield in a shallow bay, covered most of the Munsonville series of morainic hills as already noted, and swept past North Broadalbin, Benedict and Northamp- ton on the east. It is of peculiar interest that this lake, held by a glacial dam reaching toward Conklingville, is soon to be essentially renewed by a power dam placed on the site of that preglacial divide in the mountains. The facts concerning this new development be- long in a later section devoted to geography. In concluding this sketch of Lake Sacandaga, we refer the reader to Fairchild (T2, p. 35 and 36). On pages 35 and 36 and in the map, plate 8, matters pertinent to the foregoing sections are treated. The author regrets that he is unable to concur in the conclusions of Professor Fairchild as expressed in the text and the map. Some further reference to the problems involved will be necessary in our later discussion of the history of Mohawk glacial waters, in so far as the phenomena of our area of study may throw light on that history. LAKE SCHOHARIE An interesting deposit of lacustrine sands and clays is found along the Schoharie creek, beginning at Esperance and extending up the valley for some miles in both the Fonda and Schoharie quadrangles. The cause is found in the dumping of till and filling of the valley to considerable depths between Esperance and the Mohawk river. This barrier lay in great strength between Burtons- ville and Esperance. At the great spur projecting into the valley from the east above Burtonsville the cliffs are 200 feet high, about 50 feet at the base being cut in bed rock. Lake Schoharie must have GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 55 stood at least as high as 700 feet above tide, behind the till dam, and must have extended about 20 miles up the Schoharie valley from Esperance. The lake deposits reach 680 feet near Sloansville, where Fly creek enters the main valley. There is apparently a well-marked delta belonging to this lake above Central Bridge and along the valley toward Cobleskill. There can be little doubt that there was a glacial Lake Schoharie held by a receding ice barrier as the glacier waned in the upper valley. The lake already described would have been a successor to this, as it lay behind its till barrier in late glacial, and in postglacial time. Fuller knowledge of both the glacial and postglacial phases of Schoharie waters requires detailed study outside of the field of this report. DIVERSION OF THE SACANDAGA RIVER The Sacandaga river makes an abrupt turn at Northampton and flows northward past Edinburg, crosses the Stony Creek quadrangle, passes through a gorge in the mountain at Conklingville and enters the Hudson river at Hadley and Luzerne. The river thus shuns the relatively low country between it and the Mohawk and returns north- ward to cross a mountain range. The 720-foot contour line of the map crosses the river one mile below the Northampton bridge. Thence the descent is but 20 feet to Conklingville, a distance of about 15 miles. C. M. Sumner of Edinburg informed the writer that in flood time the drivers had trouble to prevent the logs, which were on their way from the Adirondack forests, from going off into the big Vly. The current is sluggish and the flood plain is at times a swamp from Northampton to Conklingville. Mr Sumner also men- tioned that Sir William Johnson was said to have used a canoe in parts of the Vly where boating is not now possible. The idea of a shift in the lower courses of the Sacandaga and the Hudson does not wholly belong to physiographers. On the writer’s mention of these probable changes (the conversation was in 1906) Mr Sumner said he had thought of that theory. A farmer harvesting buckwheat on the flood plain below Northville voluntarily suggested the former existence of a lake, and had thought about the possible change of course by the river. The difficulty of tracing an idea to its sources is illustrated here, as also in the shrewd guesses by Timothy Dwight and other early travelers, as to the origin of 56 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Niagara, of the gorge at Little Falls and other scenic features of the State (Brigham, ’14). The destructible sedimentary rocks lying between Northampton and the Mohawk river must have so yielded to the processes of normal degradation as to carry the Sacandaga to the Mohawk. This development was interrupted and an anciently established regime revolutionized by glacial changes, which led to the deposition of our interlobate moraine and left along its course a mass of drift which dammed the preglacial valley and sent the river back to cross an old col in the mountain range at Conklingville (Miller, Ti, p. 54-56). In a precisely similar manner the preglacial Hudson river flowed southward by Corinth, through Greenfield and west of Saratoga Springs. It was dammed by morainic barriers south of Corinth and Palmer and sent toward the sea across the mountains by Spier Falls, Glens Falls and Fort Edward (Miller, Tia). The upper courses of Hans and Kenneatto creeks in the Broadalbin quadrangle are suitably aligned to join a trunk stream leading south- ward to the Mohawk. They now swing abruptly northward near Benedict and Vail Mills. Professor Miller in the first reference has given a map of the probable glacial drainage, in a normal den- dritic plan. The map shows various streams, including one flowing southward from Batchellerville, the two above mentioned and others which join the trunk current of the Sacandaga on its way to the Mohawk. It should be said, however, that we can not be sure that we have at any point in their courses the preglacial valleys or axes of move- ment of Hans and Kenneatto creeks. Glacial changes, especially in massive deposits of drift, may have completely reorganized the sub- sidiary as well as the trunk drainage of the quadrangle. Where did the Sacandaga river enter the Mohawk? This ques- tion is of special interest to the physiographer who studies the quad- rangles here under survey. Our knowledge of the depth of the drift and of the position of the bed rock surfaces does not now admit of reaching a secure answer to the question. We do not know the depth of land waste to the bed rock in the great Vly. Thence to the south border of the Broadalbin quadrangle the drift is very heavy. We should expect to find the preglacial pass- age to the Mohawk across the northern section of the Amsterdam quadrangle. But here we encounter too frequent outcrops of the bed rock to admit of a spacious valley which might now be filled with drift. The valley entering Cranesville, minus its drift filling, is spacious but reaches bed rock levels of 600 to 700 feet of altitude GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 57 within two miles of the Mohawk. Unless, in conditions now un- known, the Mohawk has deepened its channel by erosive action since the diversion of the Sacandaga, we should need to find the Sacandaga channel gradually for many miles approaching grade with the Mohawk. This is not true north of Cranesville. It is conceivable that the Sacandaga found a way to the southeast through the Glenville gap, but apparently bed rock under the Alplaus kill in the Schenectady quadrangle is found at too great an altitude to favor this alternative. There remains the possibility of an outlet by way of Johnstown and west of Fonda where now is the Fonda wash plain. It is possible that in the very ancient faulting which produced the escarpment running toward Northville the down-thrown block may have had such an attitude as to force the lower Sacandaga westward toward the line of dislocation. These alternatives are quite of a conjectural nature, but they do at least suggest the opportunities of further study. The writer of a recent volume of Mohawk valley annals thinks that “probably the Cayudutta or some similarly located stream was one of the ancient water courses which drained the southern Adiron- dack slopes.” He mentions the Caroga, East Canada creek, and West Canada creek, making no reference to the Sacandaga river, but we have here another of those blind guesses which may approach the truth (Greene, ’24, p. 106). WATER-LAID DRIFT DEPOSITS ALONG THE MOHAWK RIVER OF ALTITUDES BETWEEN 400 AND 480 FEET One of the most persistent features of the inner trough of the Mohawk river is in the existence on its borders of bodies of stratified material. They consist of sand, gravels and clays in deltalike forms in reentrants of the valley side, and of shoulders of stratified drift along the upper slopes of the valley walls forming narrow platforms against the till slopes that rise beyond them. These deposits have surface altitudes of between 400 and 500 feet, but range for the most part from 440 to 460 feet. These deposits with their striking accordance of levels were noted and some of them briefly described by the writer in an earlier paper (’98). In the paper to which reference is made, it was observed that deposits of this character and altitude prevail between Little Falls and Schenectady. Later and more detailed observation reveals more examples than were recognized in the paper cited. The glacialist would expect to find these flat-topped masses of stratified drift which flank a river showing morainic or ice-contact 5B NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM slopes, thus giving us kame terraces. Such slopes are absent from these forms. Likewise we do not find the lobate borders or fringes which we should expect if the deposits were deltas built into an extended lake occupying the valley. Both the kame terrace and the delta may here be present though the characteristic slopes do not exist. We have but to recognize the presence through a long time in this valley of powerful currents of water, here escaping east- ward from vast and changing glacial lakes in the Laurentian basin. At many points sections of till appear on the lower valley slopes, below the cover of washed materials. The washed drift would nor- mally mask the valley side to the bottom. It has been persistently and powerfully cut away by streams, or by slipping in standing water, leaving in places slopes that are almost precipitous and quite unsuited to a mature valley, whether that valley has or has not seen glacial occupation. The most westerly area on the north side of the river extends from the northern Nose to Fonda. It thus fronts the river for five miles. The northern end of the deposit is a mile south of Sammonsville along the Cayudutta. As may be seen from the map, the deposit is triangular in form and is continuous through most of its extent but is much dissected along its northeastern border by the Cayudutta and its tributaries. The continuous area west of the Cayudutta is locally known as the Sand Plains. The surface of this section is very smooth and marked by soils of a fine and silty nature. Much of the deposit has surfaces at about 440 feet. The altitude rises slightly against the hill bases. Against the Noses escarpment the 460- foot contour marks very closely the upper limit. Its border under the escarpment has been changed through removal by the streams descending the slope, and by wash from the till mass above. Thus the contact with the slope is obscured. At the Roman Catholic cemetery north of Fonda the surface materials are loam, with gravel below three feet. The surface is very flat on both sides of the road. The plain here reaches above 460 feet. At the head of the deposit below Sammonsville we find a very flat and smooth surface 27 feet above the road. The Fonda cemetery and the ground eastward show yellow silt. One exposure in the cemetery is quite clayey, and across the road from the ceme- tery west the fields are flat and loamy without stones. We have clearly a deposit in standing water, which in form and relations seems to be a delta of Cayudutta creek made either in an extended Mohawk lake or in a more local pocket by the side of an ice tongue. The case is not however quite so simple as the statement would imply. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 59 On the south or river side of the plain, midway between Yosts and Fonda, is a 40-foot section showing sand and gravel, some of it coarse, with large and subangular cobblestones and small boulders. The beds alternate in coarseness and in places show a moderate dip away from the river. That during part of the period in which the plain was building there was an ice tongue and the feeding of waste from the south is strongly suggested. In the northern part of the plain if we had a simple delta we should not expect such a prevalence of silt. This may be partly ac- counted for by the flow from the glacial Lake Sacandaga. The coarser materials discharged into that lake would be found under the marsh deposits of that region, and the silts alone would reach the Mohawk trench. This feature of the outlet flow and the consequent lack of the tools of erosion may account for the imperfect develop- ment of the outlet channel near Johnstown. We may now call attention to a condition that obtains in many localities as we go eastward. The map shows areas of till occurring under and at the edge of the wash plain west of Fonda. The till also appears at the base of the slopes as we go up the Cayudutta valley; also east of the village of Fonda for some distance. The washed mantle of the valley sides has been cut away, exposing the basal masses of till. In this connection we may observe the hill rising steeply within the village of Fonda, around which runs an old channel of the Cayu- dutta creek. The hill is known as Tayberg, traditionally so named because early settlers found there an herb which they used for tea. The hill is not smooth and drumloid as indicated, but has a knife- edge crest from north to south. The body of the hill is of laminated clays near the base with sandy silts above. There is till at the base on the north. Steep sides and frailty of materials have caused several landslips about the hill. On the south side of the river southward from Randall and ad- joining Yatesville creek and Allston creek are two shelves at 400 to 440 feet that look like deltas. They are more terracelike and flat- topped than is shown by the contours of the map. The material seen looks like an oxidized till but lacustrine sediments may have been overswept by torrential wash from the steep slopes to the southward. We need to remind ourselves of the swift and effective erosive action that took place on bare slopes recently freed from ice. From Fultonville, which is across the Mohawk river from Fonda, a compact body of washed drift stretches eastward almost to Scho- harie creek. It is five miles long and varies in width from one to one and one-half miles. It is bisected by the valley of Auriesville 6o NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM creek, and upon it, near that village, stands the well-known shrine erected in memory of Father Isaac Jogues, missionary to the Indians, who suffered martyrdom here in 1646. To this body of washed materials we give the name Schoharie Wash Plain. We hesitate to call it a delta of the Schoharie creek although it may be partly of that nature. It would seem to be in relation with small shoulders of washed material at 400 to 420 feet south of Fort Hunter, and with similar features of considerable extent east and west of Tribes Plill on the north side of the Mohawk river. Projecting from the silt cover east of Auriesville is a high spur of till reaching to Schoharie creek. About one mile above Auriesville following Auriesville creek, on the east side of the stream, the cliff shows about 70 feet of till, 40 feet at the base and the upper parts oxidized. Above the till are two to three feet of silt. We thus see that the lacustrine sediments covered a strong till ridge, earlier deposited, and it is evident that the lake beds and the till ridge have been vigorously cut away by the Schoharie creek and by the Mohawk river. Going south from Fultonville, one- fourth of a mile up the hill, at the intersection of two roads, an excavation for a hydrant showed four feet of laminated clays at an altitude between 400 and 420 feet. West of the road intersection a remnant of the water plain terminates against the hill slope. East of the above-mentioned fork in the road is a large sand pit of recent and current working. Here in a fresh exposure are delta sands showing topset and foreset beds, indicating entrance of water from the west. It is not thought, how- ever, that this explains the great body of the deposits which widens eastward and extends several miles along the river. As we go southeast on the road toward Glen we are on or slightly above the plain at various points. At the Fultonville reservoir the material is till, at 480 feet. South of the next road intersection stony till occurs at 500 feet. A little farther south, at 460 feet, the surface is very smooth and flat and the material is clay without stones. As we cross Auriesville creek, still going toward Glen, a few rods north by the road we find several feet of fine clay at 440 feet. We thus find an upper limit of 440 to 460 feet where the plain abuts against the southern hills. Three miles up Auriesville creek from the south edge of the plain, and two miles southwest of Glen, by the side of the road the creek has made a 40-foot section, showing at bottom 20 feet of blue till, then several feet of laminated clays, and above, an oxidized till with strings and pockets of silty clay and loam. The altitude is GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 6l 460 feet and we may have a remnant of sediments deposited all the way up to this point and later largely removed by the stream. We have a good illustration of lake work in front of a glacier retreat- ing from a highland area. It will be observed by consulting the map that terrace levels of washed drift occur at and west of the village of Tribes Hill, the approximate altitude being 440 feet. Here also the till underlies the silt though not visible at all points along the river base of the terrace. An outlier of this area of lake sediments appears across Danascara creek westward. There, over till, are 15 feet of dark blue, laminated clays and on these are six to ten feet of yellow sand. Danascara creek without doubt entered the Mohawk river near Tribes Hill in preglacial time. Drift blockade at that point turned it southward and it has in its new and shorter course cut through bed rock and made the gorge above the DeGraff mansion on the Fonda road (fig. 60). Eastward from the Tribes Hill area the Antlers Country Club and golf links occupy a similar terrace. Along the electric railway from Antlers station to the brook three-fourths of a mile eastward is an almost continuous section of heavy till, with many glaciated pebbles and boulders. The grounds lie on a flat-topped ridge extending from the creek on the west to a field on the east, which bears an ancient cemetery of the Kline family. The flat top of the ridge is 20 to 30 rods wide and its altitude is about 460 feet. It is composed of washed drift lying on the till. On the north is a swamp covering the divide between two brooks. North of this swamp is a fine drumloid hill, whose slopes bear spurs and alternate depressions due to the erosion of the rather sandy materials. The clubhouse is on the south slope of the flat-topped ridge, and fine groves of pine are the appropriate product of the sandy soil. The city of Amsterdam with its suburbs affords dense settlement for four miles along the north bank of the river, reaching up and over the steep valley walls to the north. These conditions have given us many instructive sections, and we have almost everywhere washed drift lying above till. We begin, however, with Port Jack- son, that section of Amsterdam which is south of the Mohawk river. Here on either side of the South Chuctenunda creek are platforms consisting of lacustrine beds resting on till. On the west side is Yankee hill, deeply cut for the West Shore Railway. Much slipping has since taken place, but earlier views showed a few feet of silts sharply capping an irregular top surface of till, at altitudes of 400 to 420 feet. 62 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM East of South Chuctenunda creek is a flat-topped ridge more than a mile long, with altitudes up to 440 feet or a little above. The top is of yellow silt on heavy stratified clay. The north half is nearly level but has some small shallow pits, not typical kettles, but sags with flat bottoms. The south half of the ridge seems morainic but with silts superimposed and the reliefs perhaps later accented by dissection. We seem to have a hilly moraine more or less fully occupying the preglacial triangular basin where the South Chucte- nunda then joined the Mohawk. This was later masked as on Yankee hill by the washed drift. South of the Dutch Church, where the road turns up the hill toward Minaville, a section shows 15 feet of fine black clay which is in part at least due to the working down of the Utica shales of the region. Here in the clay, striated fragments are fairiy abundant. To the south and toward the top of the hill on the east of the road is a brickyard. The top of the pit is about 20 feet lower than the road, which is there at 400 feet. The section shows 30 feet of solid laminated clay, oxidized for 10 to 12 feet at the top, the rest black and of exceedingly fine texture. A good number of finely glaciated stones lie on the floor of the pit, including a number of small boulders. Here we have lake clays, into which icebergs dropped these interesting fragments. Reviewing now the conditions on the north side of the river, Green Hill Cemetery and the district locally known as Cork hill belong to a platform of washed drift at 420 to 440 feet. The subsoils are vari- able with clay, sand and gravel, the east end or newer part of the gravels being of coarse material and always well drained. An open- ing on Cork hill showed well-stratified, coarse sand which screened out some gravel. A small district, thickly settled, north of the Kellogg dam is an extension of the cemetery area of washed drift. In a ravine cutting the slope nearly a mile west of Church street and the cemetery, on the east side of the road, are 30 feet of typical till with striated boulders, and overlying are six to eight feet of sandy silts horizontally stratified. The altitude is 440 to 460 feet. The great pit north of Guy Park avenue, opposite Caroline street, was open for many years. There are about 60 feet of exposure, the top of the section being at the 400- foot contour. The pit is 40 rods long, the basal parts of the section showing till with great numbers of well-striated boulders and the top consisting of about 10 feet of stratified, fine sands. Ground waters issue at the top of the till. Here the silts at the sides come down to the base of the hill, showing that at this point there has been no powerful erosion by Iroquois cur- rents. This pit is described as it was in 1906. It has now been long GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 63 abandoned. The floor and sides are nearly covered with vegetation and on one part of the back slope we might call the trees a forest. Likewise many sections along the West Shore Railway and the Sche- nectady and Gloversville electric railway are now obscured. Next to Caroline street is Evelyn avenue, running up the steep slope to the northwest. Exposures of 12 feet show tough blue till at the base overlaid by stratified materials, including some clay but chiefly yellow sand. At the top of the steep hill Evelyn avenue inter- sects Greenwood avenue. Above the latter for some distance the banks made by grading Evelyn avenue show the yellow sand. Figure 6 Generalized section at Amsterdam and other points along the Mohawk river looking east 1 Till veneer on the upland 2 Massive till on the valley side 3 Shoulder of water-laid drift 4 Eroded till washed boulders 5 Flood plain very narrow, absent in places 6 Mohawk river West of the intersection just named at the head of a small ravine an extensive excavation shows 50 feet of gravel and sand. A few boulders appear near the top but in general there is an alternation of gravel and silts with 10 feet of sand at the bottom. A few rods away there is blue till on a level with the sand. Farther west toward Fort Johnson sections are like that of the big pit opposite Caroline street, showing till at the base and washed materials above. Fairview and St Mary’s cemeteries in this locality show interesting irregularities of deposit. In Fairview cemetery the superintendent informed the writer that the sand is in patches, some- times with gravel in all the lower parts of the field, with clay in the upper part. Similar conditions prevail in St Mary’s cemetery, with mixtures of loam, sand and clay. If one burial lot is dry there is no certainty that the next one will also be dry. The clay subsoils predominate, and in both burial grounds springs and ground waters are quite too common. Conditions strongly suggest deposition on the borders of an ice 64 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM tongue. The altitudes are 420 to 440 feet. The contouring of the map is here very faulty, the flat shoulder appearing 100 feet too high. Going north along the creek valley above Fort Johnson we have exposures varying from 50 to 125 feet above the Old Fort. At the lower levels are irregular beds of coarse sand and beds of sandy till. Farther up the valley but at a level with the last are horizontally bedded silts. Higher up is a crumbly clay, fine in texture and dark in color. Still farther up, at 440 feet, are loamy silts. Here also the contouring is at fault, as there is really a tabular surface at the altitude just named. A highly interesting and instructive section is found in McFarlane Brothers’ sand pit, west of Northampton road in Amsterdam. The section (figs. 7 and 47) shows from the base, blue sand, silt alternat- ing with sand irregular in stratification, then sands and silts and at the top three to seven feet of laminated clays. The last look like a water-laid till, having plentiful stones and boulders, some of which are typically glaciated. Figure 7 MacFarlaine Brothers’ sand pit, Amsterdam. Read from bottom up. 6 Laminated till with ice-borne stones 3-7 feet 5 Silt, 3-5 feet 4 Sand, 1^2 to 3 feet 3 Silt alternating with sand, 1 -6 feet 2 Bluish sand 6 feet maximum 1 Talus GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 65 We seem to have here the combination of tumultuous and hori- zontal deposition which we might expect in a kame terrace, with berg deposits at the top. It will be remembered that a similar condition is found south of the river at Port Jackson. Going east in Amsterdam, we find the same conditions as elsewhere. North of Main street, opposite Vrooman street, bed rock is covered with till, and going up the hill we find the rock covered with horizontal beds of sand and silt to a thickness of 35 feet. Here and eastward toward Cranesville is a steep bed rock valley side with a till mantle of variable thickness capped with washed drift. One-half mile east of Cranesville the road begins to ascend Swartz hill. At about 400 feet A. T. are 30 feet of stony sand with many scratched fragments and little if any stratification. We may have here a washed deposit worked over by ice. A bisected shoulder of washed drift stands north of Hoffman Ferry, between altitudes of 420 and 480. The easterly part is not brought out by the contours. No structure sections were seen but we doubtlessly have here deltas or sand plains at the mouth of the Chaug- tanoonda and an unnamed stream one-half mile east of it. A mile east of Hoffman is the Waters station of the electric railway. Above this station along Verf creek, at 410 feet A. T., is a small washed shoulder representing the stage found in so many places westward. A mile southeast of Rotterdam Junction, rising along a small un- named stream, are several drift platforms of which the highest, at 400 to 420 feet is the broadest. The surface is uneven and very stony, which is not surprising when we note that nearly a thousand feet of steep slopes lie above it. Summary of Levels Fonda wash plain 440 to 460 feet Near Randall 400 to 440 feet Schoharie wash plain 440 to 460 feet Tribes Hill 440 to 460 feet Antlers 460 feet Yankee Hill, Port Jackson 400 to 420 feet Port Jackson, South 440 to 420 feet Amsterdam, East of. Church street 420 to 440 feet Amsterdam, west to Fort Johnson... 420 to 460 feet Hoffman Ferry 420 to 480 feet Waters station 410 to 480 feet Near Rotterdam Junction 400 to 420 feet Here are 12 localities of which ten fall within the range of alti- tude of 440 to 460 feet. When we consider the possible errors of the map, of the observer’s determination by the barometer, and the vague 3 66 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM upper limits of a washed deposit, which are the rule rather than the exception, the accordance is here very striking. The determining cause of this accordance will be discussed in a later section. We may here add a reference to a bench at Fort Plain, where Otsquago creek enters the Mohawk about seven miles west of our area. Here the altitude is 460 feet. The valley of the creek from Vanhornsville to Fort Plain has no high terraces or deltas of washed drift, but exhibits rather those forms of erosion and alluvial deposi- tion which belong to a vigorous stream dissecting a heavy till and also cutting in places into the bed rock lying below. Likewise the valley at Caroga creek is mainly cut in till, but has a small body of water-laid drift at Ephratah at about 740 feet. As above Fort Plain on the Otsquago, so above Palatine Church and along the Mohawk in that neighborhood, rather flat areas as seen on the map belong to the massive till that almost everywhere follows the inner trough of the Mohawk river. ICEBERGS We have already noted the presence at Port Jackson and on the north side of Amsterdam of scratched stones in laminated clays, indicating the presence of ice on the border of lake waters. The subject should not be passed without reference to at least two other localities. About one and one-half miles west of Tribes Hill, by Danascara creek, we find a black, laminated clay with striated frag- ments. Apparently we have here the following succession : first a heavy till composed largely of the waste of the local black shale; then wash from the till land in dark clays with glaciated stones. If, as we suppose, the ice was near at the time of the deposition of these clays, a readvance would be quite possible, explaining the till over clay which we find in one or two sections along the river. Three miles east of Port Jackson following a small creek south- ward and upward for one and one-half miles we find 70 feet of till of which the upper 15 to 20 feet are blue with scratched stones. It is very tough, has a pseudo-stratification and is apparently a berg till showing wavy horizontal lines in section but with no real sorting of materials. The altitude is between 600 and 700 feet. The four places of berg deposition here recorded are within a space of eight miles in distance and within a range of 250 feet in altitude. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 6 7 IROQUOIS WATERS IN THE MOHAWK VALLEY The body of sands and clays stretching from Schenectady east- ward and southward was deposited as a delta in Lake Albany by the vast river which brought through the Mohawk valley the drain- age of the Great lakes in the Iroquois stage. These floods, com- parable to the Niagara, or St Lawrence of today, traversed the valley from Rome to Schenectady. The Lake Albany waters stood where now, by reason of north- ward warping, we find the 360-foot contour. It will be useful to give the approximate altitudes of the surface of the Mohawk river from Rotterdam to Little Falls. The figures represent conditions prior to the construction of dams for the Barge Canal. One mile below Rotterdam Junction Hoffman Ferry Amsterdam Tribes Hill Fonda Canajoharie Fort Plain St Johns ville Below the rapids at Little Falls.... 220 feet 240 feet 260 feet 280 feet between 280 and 300 feet between 280 and 300 feet between 280 and 300 feet 300 feet 320 feet The figures now given bring out facts about the Iroquois river that are often overlooked. Not taking account of the lowering of its bed by the postglacial Mohawk, which has been small in amount, its glacial predecessor was 140 feet deep at Rotterdam, 100 feet deep at Amsterdam, 80 feet deep at Tribes Hill, diminishing gradually to 60 feet at St Johnsville, and east of the fault at Little Falls the river was 40 feet in depth. If the greatest of these depths seems excessive even for a river of the first order, we must observe that virtually Lake Albany extended a long and narrow arm up to Little Falls, and that this would have existed if no river had passed down the valley. The valley is also very narrow in some places for such a current, and the increase of velocity thus caused, combined with the presence of lake waters, explains for us the various deposits of coarse gravel which we find. The river gorge between the Noses is scarcely more than a fourth of a mile wide at the river level. Passing the gorge, the Iroquois waters spread out over a width of a mile, and a little farther down to a mile and a half. Here was therefore a sudden diminution of velocity and the coarser waste was deposited over the wide surfaces which now flank the river. 68 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM An important deposit of such waste in the form of coarse and well-rounded gravel occurs at Yosts Station, stretching for three- fourths of a mile or more along the railway and northward toward the cliff. These gravels have been extensively employed by the railway. This deposit has been long closed to observation. The waters of the Barge Canal have so raised the water table of the valley bottom as to create a long pond in the excavations made by the New York Central Railway. The description herewith given is quoted from the author’s earlier paper on the glacial formations of the valley (’98, p. 207) : It has been opened for nearly its entire length for the railway and to the depths of from five to 20 feet. The valley bottom abruptly widens from a quarter of a mile at the Noses to nearly three-quarters of a mile here, though the Calciferous (now Little Falls Dolomite) cliff still rises on the north. The railway runs between the gravel bed and the river, whose flood waters now never quite reach the track. Except at the west end, where it is a few feet higher, the gravel rises about eight feet above the present flood plain. The material is fine, very uniform, with a sandy matrix, and pebbles rarely exceeding an inch in diameter. The gravel is so clean to the top as to support only a spare growth of weeds. Along the north border the surface slopes gently toward the base of the cliff. Fresh exposures by the steam shovel show the same inclination of the strata. A long and very fine exposure near the middle of the mass shows the beds inclining down the river from 3 to 4 degrees, with elaborate displays of cross-bedding. It is plain that as the great and pent-up stream emerged from the narrow channel above, it dropped its well-worn waste as a kind of apron in the broader waters below. South of the river is Stone ridge, a feature which has given a name to one of the two small villages that lie in part upon it. The West Shore Railway is at the northern base and an abandoned river channel is on the south. Crossing this channel midway, a rude terrace on the south edge of the ridge showed, in what was then a cornfield, one-half and in places three-fourths of the surface covered with well-rounded pebbles and small cobblestones. A state pit at the east end of the ridge shows coarse gravel with tumultuous bedding. The flattish cobbles show by their position that the deposit- ing currents came from the west. The village of Fort Hunter is in part on the west end of a ridge extending eastward a half mile. It rises out of the flood plain and is cut at one point by the stream, where it rises 45 feet above low water. It probably has a till base, obscured by slip, and is topped by silts and coarse gravel. The ridge seems to be a bar built into the Iroquois waters at the mouth of the Schoharie creek. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 69 The latter has a large basin in the high Catskills and has always carried much waste. In the late glacial and early postglacial times the stream has cut down the massive barriers of till between Esperance and Fort Hunter. This would account for the glaciated boulders which seem to have been washed out of the base of the Fort Hunter ridge. One mile east of Pattersonville is a flattish ridge rising above the Mohawk flood plain and extending by Rotterdam Junction to the bridge of the Fitchburg Railway. The Rotterdam ridge drops by an escarpment of 20 feet to the Mohawk flood plains on the north. Streets running north from the main road at Rotterdam Junction end at the top of the bluff. East of the bridge the ridge, at a height of about 60 feet above the river, continues eastward. It is south of the New York Central Railway and broadens as we pass into the Schenectady quadrangle toward the village of Scotia. The steep bluff cut by the Mohawk river where it leaves the quadrangle shows horizontal strata, in prominent relief, because some layers have been indurated by later infiltrations of cementing material. As described by Professor Stoller, we have here gravels deposited in Lake Albany by Iroquois floods, where the lake waters occupied the east end of the Mohawk trench. The ridge is of silts, sands and coarse and well-rounded gravel, the latter predominating more to the west, as would be expected, the finer material being floated a little farther toward the great body of standing water. West of Scotia cross-bedding is seen with prevail- ing dips eastward. An example of the coarse deposits of the Iroquois stage is found in a large gravel pit where the Mohawk turnpike descends from the Iroquois gravels to the flood plain on the north side of the river, a half mile, as seen on the map, north of the letter “J” of Rotterdam Junction. The pit is 300 feet long, and shows very coarse gravel, of but partly rounded fragments. It is full of cobblestones and of bould- ers up to a foot in size. There is much calcareous incrustation of the stones but no compacted conglomerate was seen. Many cobbles of black shale are now splitting with brief exposure. The only section of unslipped material showed pure gravel with no sand matrix (fig. 53). There are many limestone fragments. Thus the shales, limestones and calcareous incrustations point to the bed rock material of the valley and lime-charged waters moving down the lacustrine Mohawk in Iroquois times. The ridge is constructional in form with rounded surfaces and no terracing or cutting comparable to the work now in progress on 70 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM the south by the Mohawk river. This is the condition to be expected when we remember that the Iroquois floods were here depositing their coarser burden in waters more than ioo feet deep. This preser- vation of the constructional forms, with other evidence to be cited, gives confidence to the view that Lake Albany survived and retarded powerful erosion of the lower valley, until the St Lawrence valley opened to Iroquois waters and left the Mohawk valley to local conditions. It will be observed by the map that there is a small extension of Lake Albany sediments into the Amsterdam quadrangle, along the course of Norman kill. Here they attain an altitude of 360 feet as near Schenectady. Very little constructional or destructional terracing at Lake Albany levels is to be found along the river in the two quadrangles con- cerned. Traces of deltoid shelves are to be found at two or three points, as near Rotterdam Junction above Pattersonville and west of Tribes Hill. The Pattersonville shelf is southward from the village at 340 to 360 feet. Coarser material with a rough surface runs up to an altitude of about 400 feet. We seem to have here a deposit of wash from the massive till of the great slope to the south, ■ as it came to rest in Lake Albany waters. In a large pit opened by the State we find fine foreset sands at the outer or northern end of the deposit, with topset beds of gravelly sands farther back. Two miles southward of Pattersonville, opposite Rotterdam Junction, a valley is cut in the escarpment, which is inadequately shown on the topographic map. Here we have mapped an Iroquois delta which is similar in appearance to that of Pattersonville. Small deposits of like character and suitable altitude appear on the north side of the Mohawk, down the valley from Hoffman Ferry. It is very evident, however, that Mohawk valley sides were invaded before the major waters disappeared. The north valley wall has been undercut much of the way from Fonda to the east border of our district. It is this which has swept away the silts of the lower slopes and laid bare the till at so many points, as at Amsterdam. If the Lake Albany conditions outlasted Iroquois currents, we have still to remember that constant soakage and slumping at and below the 360- foot level would promote removal even by the gentle cur- rents that prevailed in this deep lower course of the Iroquois > stream. The thick shoulders of drift that rose out of this lacustrine river gave conditions favorable for landslips. One mile east of Fonda on the north shore is a series of hillocks north of the turnoike. which GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 71 at first sight looks like kames. They are, however, without much doubt due to landslips. They are backed by a steep slope of 35 to 45 degrees, which could not have been constructional and could not have been eroded if the hillocks were kames present since the glacial occupation of the valley. One of the hills is long and parallel to the escarpment, as if once a piece of it. An opening shows a mixture of clay, loam and stones, like the stony wash of the slope above it, but with no stratification. There is hummocky gravel also on the road on the border of the flood plain. This may belong to the slipped materials. We can account for its preservation when we remember that the lacustrine condition softened the vigor of the Iroquois flow (see diagram, fig. 8 and photograph, fig. 58). Figure 8 Section showing relations of landslip. Topography two miles east of Fonda. Looking west 1 Flood plain 2 Mohawk river 3 New York Central Railway 4 Highway 5 Landslip 6 Escarpment 7 Veneer of till 8 Bed rock West of Port Jackson and of Yankee hill is a belt of hummocky ground under steep bluffs. We have here the same conditions as near Fonda. It is recognized that care must sometimes be taken to discriminate between morainic and landslip forms (Johnson, D. W., ’17, p- 549)- In several sections of the valley we find abandoned channels of late Iroquois or early Mohawk age, and there are several belts of water-swept till. These are strips of valley bottom which must have been covered with Iroquois sediments that were gradually stripped off as the deeper waters subsided and removal agencies became effective. A very flat ridge of such till extends more than a mile east of Fultonville, with a disused channel between it and the West Shore Railway. Another example is found in the old valley floor running through the city of Amsterdam on the north bank of the 72 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM river. Another belt is below Hoffman Ferry and a fourth is on the north side of the New York Central Railway a short distance from the eastern border of the Amsterdam quadrangle. East of this till is a small water-swept area of loamy clay, which is so mapped by Professor Stoller, as it passes into the Schenectady quadrangle. We are here in entire agreement with Professor Stoller, but have used the symbol for an abandoned channel, as con- sistent with the plan of mapping adopted in this report. North of this washed belt at the very edge of the Amsterdam quadrangle is a sand and gravel terrace, of peculiar interest (figs. 55 and 56). It is a remnant of the Iroquois flood deposits, cut away between it and the railway. Its surface and its beds of sand and fine gravel dip toward the hill base on the north. They are well exposed in the sand pit of N. Haverly. It is still possible to see a remnant of these sands extending westward over the till, not having at that point been completely swept away (fig. 57). The fineness of the material is appropriate to its position on the northern and outer edge of the great ridge of Iroquois flood materials. Although it is not in our district, we may properly here refer to a ridge of coarse gravel of the Iroquois stage lying on the north side , of the New York Central Railway for about two miles between East creek and St Johnsville. It was no doubt a flood deposit from East creek and shows the same sort of coarse gravels and cementation which occur along the river at Rotterdam Junction and extend toward the city of Schenectady. THE PROBLEM OF GLACIAL RECESSION AND HIGH- LEVEL WATERS IN THE MOHAWK VALLEY It has been a prevalent hypothesis that glacial currents entering and filling the Mohawk valley both from the east and the west disappeared by the recession of their fronts, leaving lake waters of varying extent and depth confined between them and overflowing across available high cols or between glacial tongues and the valley sides, the surfaces of the lakes being lowered as the ice waned and uncovered lower outlets. Study of the lower Mohawk region, pursued at intervals for many years, has caused the present observer gravely to doubt the reality of the conditions outlined above, and for several reasons. These may first be stated briefly and in general terms, and then amplified and illustrated by local details. 1 There is in the field of the Mohawk glacier a remarkable absence of recessional moraines, The only possible exception in our GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 73 region is in the kames of Glenville and a few patches of morainic till on the very eastern edge of our area. The hill region south of the Mohawk, in its smooth and long-drawn drumloid curves, is free from moraines save in the trivial accumulations near Cary town and Oak Ridge. Brief reconnoisances as well as observation of the maps show the same conditions, as we believe, to prevail in the Lassellsville, Canajoharie, Richfield Springs and Winfield quad- rangles, that is, in those portions of these quadrangles which were dominated by the Mohawk glacial lobe. 2 We do not find on the higher slopes of the Mohawk trench evidence of water levels, in the form either of wave-cut hillsides or delta terraces and bars due to accumulation. It would seem that lands freshly rid of ice would send much waste down the slopes, which would be arrested at the edge of a body of water. If it be said that only small streams, excepting the Schoharie creek, flow from the southern slopes of the Mohawk, east of the Winfield quadrangle, we may cite the case of the deltas of Coy glen and others on the slopes of the Finger lake valleys, where small streams have made notable accumulations. Small interlacustrine ridges fur- nished the drainage for these glacial waters. It is also well assured that in a lake of great length, and from a dozen to thirty or forty miles in width, there would be a fetch of waves and a cutting action that would be clearly recorded. 3 Water levels do appear along the Sacandaga river and on the East and West Canada creeks. We believe that local conditions in connection with melting ice borders explain many and possibly all of these conditions. We are confident that this is true in the case of the water-laid forms of the Sacandaga valley and the reasons for this conviction will be later stated. Certain high-level deposits in the valley of East creek in the Little Falls quadrangle have been ascribed to shore lines of large lakes in the Mohawk region. We here cite the conclusions of Professor Cushing in his report on the Little Falls quadrangle (’05, p. 75, 76). Referring to sands and laminated clays, we find this statement concerning “flat-topped benches with steep sloping fronts.” “They lie at all sorts of levels from 800 up to 1500 feet. Their form is often that of delta deposits, but, if such, they represent merely very local and rather rapidly shifting water levels.” Professor Cushing then speaks of a shrinking Mohawk glacier with local lakes on the edge, receiving deposits from East Canada and Spruce creeks. 4 Some of the cols and escarpments over which or above which high-level glacial waters must have escaped, if they existed, do not seem, after careful observation, to show sufficient evidence of their 74 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM passage. As we confine ourselves so far as possible to our district and its immediate borders, we refer here especially to the Delanson col and the Rotterdam and Helderberg scarps as being natural routes of outlet for elevated waters. 5 Our conclusion therefore is that in the water-laid drift at and below 460 feet we have the chief evidence of extended waters of even moderate elevation. This does not exclude the passage of drainage across or down the Mohawk valley on stagnant ice. The accordance of levels between 440 and 460 feet, with moderate departures above and below, is too pronounced for us to avoid the conclusion that a long and straggling lake occupied the greater part of the inner trough for a considerable period. This does not ex- clude the presence of local waters beside a stagnant ice tongue, merg- ing possibly into a continuous lake from Little Falls eastward as the ice melted out. Moderate differences of altitudes suggest some localization of ice border lakes, and we may now recall the fact that we have found berg deposits as far up the valley as Amsterdam, also some evidence that there were ice-contact conditions on the south edge of the Fonda plain. We may add possible ice-contact slopes preserved on the river edge of the high-level shoulder at J Tribes Hill. The washing of the valley side drift in Iroquois floods may have destroyed ice-contact slopes at many points. 6 After the waters of the Ontario and more westerly ice lobes turned from the Chicago outlet and flowed eastward, they must some- how have found exit by the Mohawk valley. How did they go, if not through a lake or a series of lakes of lower and lower levels ? It has long been our conviction that glacialists in general have under- rated the possibilities of drainage across great bodies of stagnant ice, which, as higher lands are exposed, may be so covered with drift as to insure preservation for thousands of years. The Mohawk val- ley was so situated, athwart the main southwesterly drive of the great ice sheet, as to favor stagnation and prolonged survival. It was not until this report was taking manuscript form that the writer found and read a paper by Cook (’24) on “The Dis- appearance of the Last Glacial Ice Sheet from Eastern New York.” Here views expressed regarding receding and opposing ice fronts and regarding the presence of important bodies of stagnant ice confirmed the convictions which field study of the region long ago compelled the writer to adopt. Further references to this important paper will be in order as we proceed. We begin our review of the evidence, in a more detailed and local manner, by referring to certain water-laid bodies of drift, which GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 75 have already found upon the Broadalbin quadrangle, and have de- scribed in the sections on the Glacial Lake Sacandaga and on Sand Plains. Several of these have been referred by Professor H. L. Fairchild to his Lake Schoharie and Lake Amsterdam and have been so mapped by him (’12, p. 35, 36 and plate 8). There is no room to doubt that the water-laid drift of the Broadalbin quadrangle is fully to be accounted for by the local conditions which we have al- ready described. The Edinburg sand plain is mapped by Fairchild as belonging to Schoharie lake. The deposit was made, however, on the edge of a local ice tongue. Its maximum altitude is about 1060 feet, while the Delanson col is at 840 feet. If we allow 75 feet for differential uplift at the north as between the two points, we still have a discrepancy of 145 feet. This in our judgment would in any case have been too great a difference for correlation. We could not con- cur in Fairchild’s reference to the Knox-Delanson outflow of water levels on several Mohawk tributaries, varying from 820 to 1200 feet (’12, p. 28, 29). Professor Fairchild rules out the Knox divide at 1160 feet as having carried no water. A re-examination of the Broadalbin quadrangle during the current season confirms the con- clusion already reached. The Edinburg sand plain, although com- posed of fine and silty sand, presents on its eastern and southern fronts bold and strong slopes which could not have been made in a body of open water. As we have seen, the Edinburg sand plain is similar to those at Benedict and Hagadorns Mills. Cook makes the same interpretation (’24, p. 169) referring to “sand plains built over against its thin edge (that of the ice) by the Sacandaga river near Northampton.” We suppose that Cook means plains built on tribu- taries of the Sacandaga. In any case their variant altitudes do not admit of their marking a single lake level. The map to which we have referred distinguishes several areas as belonging to Fairchild’s Lake Amsterdam. At the opening of Gif- ford valley, west of Northville, most of the area thus marked is kame moraine and till representing the Sacandaga local ice front from which the delta of glacial Lake Sacandaga springs. The contrast be- tween the moraine and the delta terrace is sharp, the latter lying against the former (fig. 40). Up the river the valley is so blocked with massive moraine for a mile above the delta that the main high- way to Wells and northward passes at some distance from the river and goes up the valley of East Stony creek to Hope Valley. There the road crosses a flat saddle of washed drift and returns to the Sac- andaga two miles above the delta. This saddle at 900 feet is not gen- etically related to the head of the Sacandaga delta at 780 feet. The 76 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM high terrace north of Northville village is a local sand plain. The terrace on which Northville stands is part of the local delta of local Lake Sacandaga, as is also the plain on which Sacandaga Park stands. The entire deposit from the moraine above noted southward to a point east of Cranberry creek belongs without question to the delta in the glacial Lake Sacandaga. Where the Fairchild map passes from a supposed deposit of Amsterdam waters to a local Sacandaga lake delta, there is perfect continuity of level and of materials. It is be- yond question all of one piece. The long, flat hilltop between the two limbs of the Sacandaga river, colored as of Amsterdam lake, we interpret not as a water plain, but as a till veneer whose surface is determined by the great mass of hori- zontally bedded Little Falls dolomite, upon which it rests. We have a rather even hillcrest, slightly rolling in places, showing no sign of wash, deposition or cutting and everywhere showing the presence of till. Professor Fairchild carries a lake tributary to Mohawk waters through the Sacandaga valley, bearing, for a period of ice-blockade in the Hudson valley, much Adirondack drainage (’12, p. 35). We have only to say that we have not found evidence of the presence of such waters in our field of study. On conditions to the eastward, we cite Professor W. J. Miller in his study of the Luzerne region (’21, p. 53) : “It is with some hesitation that the writer expresses his doubt concerning the existence of such high-level waters in the quadrangle, but he certainly was unable to locate anything like persistent, well- defined delta lake deposits at any such level through the Hudson valley.” The Delanson col, at 840 feet, between a small branch of Scho- harie creek and Normanskill, is two miles west of the Delanson station and one mile south of the southern boundary of the Amsterdam quadrangle. It has been interpreted as the control of a Lake Schoharie extending probably from Utica to Johnstown. If this col carried any considerable stream it would have passed into the Hudson lowland (on the theory of a progressive recession of the ice front) first through Boxen kill and later by way of Normans- kill. The surface of the Delanson pass west of the crossroad leading south is apparently of till with numerous flat and angular stones such as are seen commonly in the till of this region of sandstone. They were seen in the col and in stone walls. The surface of the col slopes gently from the north and from the south to the railway track. There is at the base of the main valley slopes no sign of a GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 77 cut stream bank. East of the crossroad, in the direction of Delanson, the ground is flat and a little boggy but there are no cut banks. The valley west of the col is broadly Y-shaped but narrow, barely carrying, where the lake would have been 40 feet deep, the small stream and the railway. There is no sign of beach cutting between Delanson and Esperance, although west winds would here have had a fetch of four to six miles. Recalling other and modern levels and the cut beaches on the Finger lakes, we should expect some record here. We cite even the Madison reservoir on a headwater of the Chenango river, a pond two miles long and a quarter of a mile wide, on whose borders pronounced work has been done since the waters were dammed less than 100 years ago. If much water came over the Delanson col it w’ould have passed into the Hudson valley trough first by the valley of Boxen kill, which diverges from the Normanskill valley over a low pass about one mile south of the village of Duanesburg on the boundary between the Amsterdam and Berne quadrangles. For about one and one-half miles to the southeast there has been no stream cutting. The valley slopes are scarcely modified mantles of ground moraine. For about four miles below the Schenectady-Albany county line the Boxen kill runs through a deep gorge, cut in the bottom of a mature valley. The rock is shale, with sandy layers but easily eroded. The stream where seen at several points is cutting vigor- ously on a rock floor a bed from 60 to 80 feet wide. The kill is quite adequate to the making of this gorge in postglacial time. It has a fall of 400 feet in a distance of five miles. Several strong tribu- taries feed the stream from the high slopes on the west. These torrential branches have in several cases cut deep gorges in accord- ance with the main trough. Along the Normanskill between Delanson and Duanesburg are some swampy flats which may represent a foot-lake deposit in front of a Normanskill ice tongue. There are no terraces or suggestions of alluvium other than a few patches of recent flood plain. The Normanskill depression is spacious and impressive as seen from the hills south of it and must have held at some stage a melting tongue of decadent ice protruding from the Hudson valley. If we postulate a cover of stagnant ice in the Delanson col and in the valleys of Normanskill and Boxen kill we can imagine the passage of waters from an ice-filled Mohawk valley. Observation of the ice-free surfaces of today does not suggest that we have here abandoned stream channels, recording late glacial activity. 78 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM In the light of the facts as we have been able to observe them and as they have been outlined above, we retain the name “Lake Schoharie,” in the local sense, as originally employed by the writer (’08, p. 29, 30). We have here evidence of a well-defined body of water of which the conditioning cause, the deposits and the mode of disappearance are assured. It is recognized by all that a westward or Chicago outlet of glacial waters was followed by such lowering of the ice barriers in the Mohawk region as to reverse the flow from western and central New York and send it eastward. The critical altitudes for this change were a little below 900 feet. It is not within the sphere of this report to discuss the flow and subsidence of the waters in Central New York from the 900-foot horizon down to the Iroquois level. We simply recall the rock channels, fossil waterfalls and plunge pools near Syracuse, the scourways on the northern slopes of the plateau in central New York, the high-level terraces between Rome and Little Falls and the down-cutting of the ancient col at Little Falls. The waters that were active in these works of erosion and deposition found their escape through the Mohawk valley from Lake Warren time to the Lake Iroquois stage. Our present query is simply this : How did these waters, flowing for a long period of time, cross for a distance of about 26 miles the region which has been described in this report? We are not here considering waters of higher level in central New York which may have escaped across high cols at the head of the Susquehanna system, as these do not relate themselves to our present study. For the same reason we do not enter into the question of drainage from the Black river valley and the Adiron- dacks across the Mohawk ice or through lake waters in the Mohawk valley. Serious doubt as to the reality of great water bodies in the Mohawk region suggests inquiry as to how these waters reached the Hudson and the sea. With the down-cutting of the Little Falls barrier and the release of the waters held to the west of it, there ensued erosion and removal of great bodies of waste that had come, from the west into the spacious valley that led down to Little Falls. In addition the Chittenango, Oneida, Oriskany, Sauquoit, West Canada and other streams unloaded their waste from south and north in the same spacious valley. We should question Fair- child’s suggestion that this valley may have been completely filled with washed drift but we are prepared to believe that there were GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 79 large accumulations stored on the floor and sides of this deep and wide trough. This plentiful waste would seem competent to mask a body of stagnant ice along the Mohawk and long preserve it from melting. We may perhaps safely visualize the copious but changing and braided streams of glacial water that marked its surface. In discussing the thickness of the Mohawk ice we have already cited Dr I. H. Ogilvie’s paper on the Paradox Lake quadrangle, as postulating much stagnant ice in the Adirondack valleys. In her earlier essay, also cited, on Glacial Phenomena in the Adiron- dacks, she concludes (p. 400) “that the ice entered the region from the northeast, flowing on in that direction toward the southwest where open valleys afforded opportunity, becoming stagnant in narrow valleys,” and finally at the time of its greatest advance burying the region entirely, an “upper southwestward moving cur- rent, passing over the stagnant valley masses below.” Doctor Ogilvie also states that there was little glacial work in the deeper valleys of the central mountain area but that the summits were markedly smoothed. The Mohawk valley is a capacious trench and might therefore be expected to be unfavorable to conditions of stagnation. Other conditions, however, distinctly favor stagnation. The Mohawk val- ley stands athwart the main southerly trends of the entire body of Laurentian ice. From New England to Wisconsin there is no comparable assemblage of relief conditions in reference to the main trend of the ice movement. We are compelled to accept a late and strong westward move- ment in the Mohawk Valley. We have given reasons for believing, however, that at the time the Adirondacks were not an island in the ice, but were largely covered with a thick mass of ice mostly stagnant. If the same conditions of stagnation obtained on the northern slopes of the Catskill-Allegheny plateau from the Berne quadrangle westward, then we have the Mohawk lobe, vigorous as it was, gradually giving up its motion in the presence of retarding frictional conditions. What were these conditions? (1) The long push through the rugged Champlain-Middle Hudson trough ; (2) the swing from a southward to a westward motion of the ice; (3) the uphill push from the Hudson valley to Cedarville; (4) this push was impeded by the contacts of the active ice with great fields of stagnant ice both in the southern Adirondacks and on the northern parts of the southern plateau; (5) underneath were the rugged portals of the Mohawk near Schenectady, the angular turns of 8o NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM the inner trough of the Mohawk west of Schenectady, the spurs and escarpments of the Hoffman and Noses faults and the deep and preglacially matured Schoharie valley in a north and south alignment, which must in some measure have tended to retard the westward thrust of the ice. We here cite an example in the Chenango headwater valleys, which tends to prove that ice blocks may survive under a heavy cover of land waste for a very long period. Summit Water, two miles north of Hamilton, is a glacial lake which furnishes the municipal water supply. It is about 90 feet deep and occupies the entire valley floor between two glacial terraces. Here was the outlet from the Oris- kany and Oneida valleys during the period while the ice fronts in those valleys were building the enormous masses of moraine which block both valleys for miles. The delta in front of the Oriskany Falls kames at Solsville is now being opened by the Madison Sand and Gravel Corporation. Its deposition calls for a vast lapse of time. All the drainage had to escape over the present position of Summit water. The present basin would have been aggraded innumerable times by the escaping glacial waters, if it had been given repeated existence. We are forced to the conclusion that ice, deeply sealed in. maintained the level, and then sank away after the waters from those north sloping valleys had ceased to flow over the water parting on the south. The possibility of large areas of stagnant ice, persisting for con- siderable periods, is recognized by Professor H. L. Fairchild for the Mohawk valley, although he conceives of the later disappearance of the ice in that valley by receding fronts on the east and west. Fie postulates the clearing of the Adirondacks and the Catskill- Helderberg plateau and a “strait or neck of ice in the Mohawk valley connecting the Ontarian and Hudsonian ice lobes” (’12, p. 6, et. seq.). Fairchild thinks that glacial waters gathering about the Adirondacks must have escaped across this strait of ice which he later (p. 19) refers to as “the belt of stagnant ice which lay in the Utica-Little Falls sections of the valley.” The col north of Otsego lake is considered (p. 23) as a probable escape for Adirondack waters across “the strait of ice which filled the valley on the north.” The ice if thus stagnant and carrying northern waters to the Susque- hanna valley, would have been at least 1000 feet thick over the present channel of the Mohawk river. As has been already suggested, the existence of stagnation of wide extent and long duration has been, supported by J. H. Cook (’24), who concludes, in connection with studies in the GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 8l Albany and Berne quadrangles, that “the clean, unmodified sur- face of the fluted and drumlinized area of the Helderberg plateau negatived the assumption that glacial lakes had ever existed on its northern slopes, held in by an ice barrier at the north, or that ponded waters from the Schoharie valley had ever found outlet across these slopes as such an ice front withdrew. This observer then develops his argument that wide areas of ice pushed beyond the mountain barriers south of the St Lawrence river became stagnant soon after the height of glaciation and so remained. For the considerations which support this view we must in the main refer the reader to the paper cited. We could not go with Cook in the degree to which he would emphasize a condition of stagnation in long north and south valleys like the Hudson or the Chenango, but he rightly puts in contrast the “readable topography” of some western ice lobes with those of eastern New York. Cook, like Fairchild, seems to accept the possi- bility of Adirondack waters passing across the ice into some Susque- hanna outflow. The writer has already sufficiently emphasized the absence of recessional accumulations in his field of study. We are inclined with Cook to view this condition as an evidence of wide- spread stagnation in the Mohawk valley. The absence of any evidence of recessional fronts is in our view matched by the paucity of evidence which might show high-level waters in the valley. The conditions as regards water levels have been somewhat fully set forth and need not be here repeated. We should not leave Cook’s paper without calling the reader’s attention to his citations of Fuller and Clapp dealing with glacial Lake Neponset and the Charles river basin. On the latter Clapp has the following significant passage, “The decay of the ice in situ for many miles back from the ice front — the decaying glacier consisting of a mass of stagnant ice, overlain and buried by sheets of water and by extensive deposits of sand and gravel.” Both the Fuller and the Clapp papers are in the Journal of Geology, volume 12. Returning briefly to the question to which this section is devoted, ample waters flowing for a long period of time as measured by erosive work accomplished in central New York, passed across our two southern quadrangles. If any of these waters, or some small earlier flows, went across an ice-clogged col at Delanson, all the rest must have gone out past the Rotterdam slopes at higher or lower levels, either through lake waters or over drift-covered and Stagnant ice, 82 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM It does not seem to the writer that the evidence is yet available for a full or final discussion of the problem as we have stated it. In our view the necessary data are likely to be at hand, when a detailed survey and mapping have been accomplished for the quadrangles along and near the Mohawk river from the lower valley westward to Utica, Rome and Oneida. The water-laid waste of the Mohawk stands conspicuously around 600 feet above Little Falls and about 460 feet below that point, with lower levels toward Schenectady determined by the Iroquois flow, as free passage was opened to the Fludson valley. Assuming the long stagnation of Mohawk ice as possible, as its surface in the lower valley gradually suffered ablation below 500 feet, the debris of the higher slopes readily washed down and formed the deltoid borders and aggraded shoulders which lie between 400 and 500 feet and tend to concentrate in the middle of that interval. Further melting both in the Mohawk and Hudson valleys allowed the waters to sink to the Lake Albany level from Little Falls east- ward. In this long episode of what we may call flowing lake waters, much washed material was trimmed from the sides of the Mohawk trough. As the waters fell in the Hudson valley much more waste was excavated from the Mohawk floor and borne away. We thus arrive through the moderate changes of postglacial time to the con- ditions which now appear. POSTGLACIAL CHANGES Whenever a glacial cover is removed in a particular locality, weath- ering, rain wash and stream action come into play and produce large results in a short time. Without a cover of vegetation, and showing in many places steep constructional slopes, the land surface changes rapidly. The principal areas of ice, or lesser remnants, may be still in existence elsewhere and we can hardly call their modifications postglacial. Yet they contribute to and merge into conditions which have continued through postglacial time to the present. Postglacial Changes Apart from Human Agency The work of streams. The major streams of our district are the Mohawk river, the Schoharie creek and the Sacandaga river. Our section of the Mohawk valley lacks some of the typical features of normal river activity. It shows few meanders and no typically developed series of such curves. It is thus in contrast with the section of the valley between Little Falls and Rome. There we find wide floods1 and pronounced meanders due to the sill of hard GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 83 rocks at Little Falls, which creates a local base level. In like manner the ordinary alluvial terrace is hardly found in the lower section of the Mohawk valley from Little Falls to Schenectady. Islands in the Mohawk river, about two dozen in number, find place on the map between Tribes Hill and Hoffman Ferry, a distance of about 12 miles. These are mainly built of waste brought in plenti- fully by the Schoharie creek, which has done a large amount of erosion and transporting work in its long course among the highlands of eastern New York. It should here be observed that we have mapped all the flood plains and islands of the Mohawk as they were before the con- struction of the Barge canal raised the water levels. The Schoharie creek, within our district, that is, in the Fonda quadrangle, stands in high contrast with the Mohawk in the presence of a highly developed series of meanders, terraces and abandoned oxbow channels. The meanders are incised upon a thick and rather irregular filling of glacial waste, to which reference has already been made. The creek and its bordering forms, of rock, alluvium, glacial till and benched upper slopes, would, if properly modeled, be a useful adjunct to geographic instruction in the schoolroom and the physiographic laboratory. We are referring to the 15 miles of its lower course between Esperance and Fort Hunter. It is fully evident from the map that the valley was at several points solidly filled with till. Cut saddles of this till may have crossed the valley where it enters the Mohawk trench, a mile south of Fort Hunter; also at Mill Point, and at the power house two miles above Mill Point. There were probably several small lakes held between these till barriers, until they were breached by the action of the stream in grading its course. This lower section is marked by highly developed flood plains, terraces and abandoned channels, framed in till slopes, which are at many points exposed in stream-cut cliffs. The upper section, for about six miles, is a rather narrow gorge, in which the flood plain is not present or is trivial in extent. This narrow valley, with no continuous flood plains, and in parts with none at all, has had a singular negative effect as regards human occupation. The stream passes from the long Burtonsville gorge and then begins to swing from one side to the other under the steep cliffs which it has formed. Hence no highways and no railway have found their way here, although these works of man are found in the broad valley above. The roads near the stream are short and broken and then they climb out upon the hills. At several points roads lead down to the flood plains and end at a farmhouse. 84 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM The Sacandaga river, being reversed in flow at Northampton, found its outlet at Conldingville over a col so high as to give the river a sluggish flow in the Broadalbin quadrangle. Hence the mountain land waste has tended to accumulate along the stream from Northville to Conklingville. The flood plains are wide and there are pronounced meanders above Batchellerville, and islands above Osborn Bridge. We have already noted the broad fragment of a river terrace northward of Osborn Bridge. Several postglacial gorges have been formed by some of the minor streams. The Danascara creek between Fonda and Tribes Hill undoubtedly entered the Mohawk near Tribes Hill or opposite Fort Hunter. Its old course being filled with drift the stream has turned south, cutting a fine gorge in the bed rock of black shale, and enters the Mohawk below the De Graff mansion, which is on its west bank. A similar condition exists at Port Jackson. The South Chucte- nunda creek entered the Mohawk farther east, until the masses of drift along the Mohawk filled the lower end of the valley of the tributary. Then the stream found a lower level a little to the west, where it also has made a small gorge in the black shale. We have referred to an unnamed stream rising west of Scotch Bush and entering the Mohawk three miles east of Port Jackson, as showing massive till and having above its gorge deposits of berg clay. The gorge itself as a piece of stream work is but poorly represented on the map. It is V-shaped and averages ioo feet in depth, with segments of meander curves on its slopes and one land- slip hill of considerable size, consisting of material which has fallen from the east side. Large till accumulations ioo feet or more deep occur here. Doubtlessly the period of accumulation was vastly longer than even a small stream has required to sink a gorge and reveal the nature of the material. A similar condition appears in the Cranesville valley east of Amsterdam, where a gorge more than 150 feet deep cuts through the drift filling on the western side of the preglacial valley, leaving a massive drift shoulder on the east side. Abandoned stream courses are found south of Randall and Stone Ridge, east of Fultonville, and around “Tayberg” in the village of Fonda ; also below Hoffman Ferry on the north side of the Mohawk river. Several short sections of old stream ways occur in the Scho- harie valley. There are but few places in our region where a torrential stream with steep gradient opens abruptly into a mature valley. Hence we find few .alluvial cones of such size as to require a place on the map. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 85 An example of such a form occurs north of Yosts Station where a narrow gorge in the Nose uplift opens upon the Mohawk plain. Other examples are found at the foot of the steep slopes south of the Mohawk, as at Hoffman Ferry, Pattersonville, Rotterdam Junction and eastward. Considerable slopes of talus are found along the Mohawk river at the base of the cliffs of the Noses. Lake filling and accumulations in marshes. In a settled region it is not possible to measure deposits of the kind here named, as resulting from natural processes alone. Man has had a large part in such results, mainly through the removal of forests and by tillage. In the Adirondack section are many swamps, due to glacial clog- ging of a once matured drainage. Here are unknown thicknesses of vegetable matter and fine land wash. No doubt all the lakes have been restricted by this means. This is quite evident in marshes adjoining East and West Caroga lake, Peck lake, Chase lake and many natural ponds. Marsh areas are numerous in the belt of the interlobate moraine both east and west of Gloversville. Small marshes are quite numerous even among the drumloid hills in the southern parts of the Fonda and Amsterdam quadrangles. By far the greatest area of marsh land is of course in the Great Vly south of the Sacandaga river in the Broadalbin quadrangle. Here it is particularly difficult, or rather impossible, to determine the measure of change. It is obvious that fields shown on the map as marsh are under tillage. The rapid erosion and filling of late glacial times contributed its quota. Then came thousands of years of vegetable growth and decay, followed by the short period of man’s work. The filling of these low grounds is a composite of these several agencies and periods of time. GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS IN TPIE LOWER MOPIAWK VALLEY Introductory Statement We have purposely used the words “geographic conditions” rather than the term “geography.” Geography, without qualification, would require a treatment much more symmetrical and detailed than the purpose of this report and the space available would permit. It is plain that statistical treatment, particularly of the subjects of population and agriculture would be impossible or at least imprac- ticable, because the quadrangles of the Geological Survey are laid out with reference to lines of latitude and longitude and pay no heed to the boundaries of counties, townships or municipalities. 86 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM We propose to show in outline how man has entered this field and used it as his home and sphere of activity — a sketch rather than a completed portrayal. We find here a series of human adaptations to physical conditions. There has been a progress of settlement, a growth of towns, a development of agriculture and an unfolding of manufacturing industries. All of these, although to a lesser degree true of the last, have been rather intimately related to the rocks, the relief, the drainage, the drift deposits and the climate of the region. Physical and historical, populational and industrial, rural and civic geography, all find place here, although it is neither necessary nor possible to place them in close compartments or make a strict analysis. Here is a physical area having a fair degree of coherence if not of unity. Our query is : What has man done with it and to what degree may he have the intellectual satisfaction of interpreting what he does, by what nature has done in the long durations that preceded his coming and his toil ? The literature that unfolds these human doings is fragmentary but abundant. It is found in many volumes of Indian lore, in innumerable essays and volumes of history, in poetic, reminiscent and fictional writing, in state documents, the statistics of government departments and the proceedings of historical and other societies. No attempt has been made to cover this material in our bibliography. Rather, at the end of this report, along with the geological references, we have given a limited list of titles, by which the reader who is specially interested in the human aspects of our region may be guided to further inquiry. We shall use such space as we have in outlining early occupation, the location and development of centers of popu- lation, the use of the soil, the facilities of transportation and the initiation of manufactures. Sites and Trails of the Mohawk Indians The Mohawk Indians are said to have entered the valley which bears their name in modern times, because they had been driven from their seats in the St Lawrence valley. They found in the valley above Schenectady a congenial home because there was much fertile bottom land where they could raise their corn, pumpkins, beans and tobacco. After the whites had settled in the Hudson valley the Indians found themselves conveniently located in reference to the carrying place of Schenectady and the markets of Fort Orange. They were also near to the fishing of Saratoga lake and to the old and familiar trails that led to Lake George and to Lake Champlain. We reproduce from Dr W. M. Beauchamp’s map of aboriginal occupation (fig. 9) a section which includes our four quadrangles. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 87 Figure 9 Early and recent sites of the aborigines of New York. 88 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM We take in also considerable territory outside in order to place our region in its general setting. The area reproduced, beginning on the east below Schenectady, reaches beyond East creek and includes most of the Indian sites between Utica and Albany. The localities include villages, fortifications, burial places and work sites and caches of im- plements. Most of them are within a few miles of the Mohawk river. The sites are numbered by counties. We shall note a few of the localities but the reader who would gain fuller knowledge is referred to Doctor Beauchamp’s report (’oo), in which, under the several counties the author summarizes the main facts. Most of the sites in our territory are in Montgomery county, with a few in the counties of Schenectady, Saratoga and Fulton. Driven from the St Lawrence by Hurons and Algonquins about 1550, the Mohawks came to the hills about the Mohawk, the junction of Schoharie creek and the Mohawk river being central to their various settlements. Here they were the easternmost of the tribes which had recently formed the League of the Iroquois, whose people held the Long House from the Hudson to the Niagara river. The Mohawks are said to have secluded themselves at first in locations among the hills for security from their enemies. Later they ventured down to the attractive bottom lands along the river. West of Fonda the sites are numerous on both sides of the river, not only in the Fonda quadrangle but in the adjoining Canajoharie area. One mile north of Sammonsville was a stockade on the east bank of Cayudutta creek. This is number 3 of Fulton county and is fully described by Reid (’01, p. 6-1 1). A Mohawk village (no. 14, Montgomery county) lay south of the Cayudutta on the Fonda wash plain. This was the scene of a successful defense by the Mohawks against their enemies the Mohicans (Reid, ’01, p. 181). There was a village near Yosts Station and there were other sites in this neighborhood. To the east there was a late Indian village at Tribes Hill. On the south of the Mohawk there was an important settlement at Fort Hunter and the “lower castle” of the Mohawks was west of Schoharie creek near its junction with the Mohawk river. Another castle was at or near Fultonville. There was a village site with a cemetery near Auriesville (no. 26) and a village near Mill Point on the Schoharie. Rock paintings were made by Indians on the north bank of the river at Amsterdam (no. 29). Flints have been found in the eastern part of the town of Amsterdam and at various noints north- GLACIAL GEOLOGY OP THE LOWEft MOIiAWK 89 west of Schenectady (nos. 1, 3 and 5, Schenectady county), in Glenville and near Pattersonville. Arent Van Curler’s journey in 1634 took him through our part of the Mohawk country and aroused his admiration. Many things con- spired to make this impression — rugged relief softened by forests which were broken only here and there by fields of the red man, and the silver ribbon of the Mohawk winding between the forests and slopes on the north and the south. Several aboriginal trails cross our area. First is the great central Iroquois trail leading from Albany to the west. It was trod by Indians, deepened by footsteps of discoverers and pioneers and was the forerunner of the trunk line of communication today. This trail split at Schenectady, following both the north and the south banks of the Mohawk river. The south bank was much used in aboriginal days because there were the three chief Mohawk castles and attendant settlements, the lowest being near the mouth of Schoharie creek. The trail on the north bank diverged at Tribes Hill to Johnstown and then led back to Caughnawaga (Fonda). Singularly, one would now have to pursue a similar course to go by electric car from Tribes Hill to Fonda. A branch trail left the main Mohawk path at Fort Hunter, led up the Schoharie and Cobleskill creeks and thence to the trails that fol- lowed the Susquehanna river. The Kayaderosseras trail began at Fonda and conducted the red man on missions of peace or war, through the township of Amsterdam, then northward through Galway and Providence to Lake George and Ticonderoga. Johnstown is on an old Indian trail that led northward through the Sacandaga country to Canada. If we had a complete map of all the primary and second- ary paths of the Indians in our region, we should no doubt have a fairly complete plan of the main avenues of transportation today. Originals are as hard to trace in this field of human activity as in the interpretation of physiographic facts. Early White Settlements Fort Orange (Albany) was established in 1623 and not many years later a Dutchman, Arent Van Curler, made the first recorded exploration by any white man, of the Mohawk valley. In 1662 Schenectady was founded at the gateway of the valley, by Van Curler and others. Beginning there a peninsula of advanced settlement was projected up the Mohawk for 16 miles, having a width of eight miles. Nearly all this tract, with the Mohawk as its axis, lies go NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM within our territory. This new peninsula of population was to be preeminently Dutch, and the western limit as then laid out was not far from Cranesville, below Amsterdam. It is worthy of note as being the first push of the white man into this unique gateway of the northern Appalachian highlands. From Pearson’s History of the Schenectady Patent, we here record the names of men who were early possessors of lands on the north side of the river, between Schenectady and Cranesville. The names include Viele, Joncker, Van Hoeck, Vynhout, Schermerhorn, Peek, Kleyn, Marinus, Groesbeck, Mebie, Vander Volgen, Toll, De Moer, Van Coppernol, Swart, Van Eps, Wemp, and Groot (later known as Groat). Farther west on the north bank, and on the south bank as well, the pioneer record leads us back to the Dutch of the Netherlands, New Amsterdam and the Hudson valley. Sammons, Schenck, DeGraff, Van der Veer, Fonda, Yost, Visscher and others are names, many of which would be found in any telephone list along the river as far west as Canajoharie and Fort Plain. It is the part of other works to describe some of their memorials. A symbol of this Dutch permanence is the Mabie house at Rotterdam Junction, built in 1670, bought by Jan Pieter se Mabie in 1706, and since that time a family possession. The Van Eps family were the first to settle at Hoffman and in 1923 the seventh generation was in ownership of the ancestral land. The second population group which made a defined and notable entrance into our territory was the Palatine Germans. Dissatisfied with the arrangements on the Hudson, they migrated without the permission of the constituted authorities to the Schoharie lands in 1712 and 1713. After a winter journey of incredible hardship, they settled among friendly Indians. Here their titles to the lands were disputed by claimants of prior rights. From 150 to 300 families, according to various opinions, were concerned here and another emigration, farther up the valley, followed. We are here primarily interested in the fact that a considerable number of families remained on the Schoharie and have become a part of the permanent popula- tion. They have left little or no impress on the geographic names of our quadrangles, but a little to the west and extending up to their new home at German Flats (Herkimer) these memorials begin to appear on the map. In the Canajoharie quadrangle we find Pala- tine, Palatine Bridge and Palatine Church. This second wave of white immigration swept across our area and came to rest in the GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 91 middle section of the Mohawk valley. Those who remained on the Schoharie recall to us the hardships of their native Rhineland, the uncertainties of their sojourn in England, their suffering on the Atlantic, their virtual slavery on the Hudson and the large place in State and Nation attained by their descendants in the Mohawk valley. The most notable immigrant to our region from the British Isles and one of the greatest characters in American colonial history was Sir William Johnson. More than any other man he held the Iroquois Indians loyal to British interests against French encroachment from the north and west, and more than any other person he promoted British immigration into our region and made white residence in the Mohawk valley safe and profitable. He died before the Revo- lutionary War began and the allegiance of his son, Sir John Johnson, to the crown, made possible the persistence and extreme bitterness of border warfare. It is no part of our plan here to sketch or estimate the career of Sir William. We desire simply to refer to the lands which he owned and the structures which he built, as geographic units of our area. They are of peculiar interest from the point of view of historical geography and can not be made known too widely to those who travel in our territory. Sir William was of distinguished Irish lineage, with a strain of French blood. He came to America, a young man, in 1738, to superintend the lands of his uncle, Sir Peter Warren. These lands were east of Port Jackson and extended south from the Mohawk river. The settlement was known as Warrensbush and has long since disappeared. It is the first among the sites connected with Johnson’s career. In 1742 Sir William removed to the site now known as Fort John- son, near the mouth of a creek, three miles west of the business center of Amsterdam. Here he soon built and occupied for many years the house which is now the home of the Montgomery County Historical Society. The stream, which had made deep cuts in the glacial drift, gave him the opportunity to erect a gristmill and a sawmill. This is the second Johnson site. In 1766 he built for his nephew, Guy Johnson, a stone mansion which stands in the western part of the city of Amsterdam between the railway and the river. It is known as Guy Park, is owned by the State and is used by the Daughters of the American Revolution. In location, though not in historic order, we call it our third Johnson site. 92 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Restricted, as it would seem, by other patents, from acquiring lands near Fort Johnson, he with others secured the Kingsborough patent, taking up a large tract where Johnstown and Glover sville now stand. He built in the edge of what is now the city of Johnstown, Johnson Hall. He removed there about 1763 and there in manorial state he spent the remaining years of his life. He built a jail and a courthouse which are still in use, and in his home, conferences with Indians, visits of distinguished whites and affairs of wide import set apart this fourth Johnson site to historic fame. Fond of sport, he built “Fish House,” a summer home, on the southern bend of the Sacandaga river, where the village of North- ampton now is. This house was burned in a raid from the north, hv his son, Sir John Johnson, in 1780. This is our fifth site and a sixth is in Broadalbin township on whose ground he built another summer home. We may see Sir William in other relations which are geographic. None better than he knew the remote trails of wide forests, but we cite simply the journey which he made, carried by Indians on a litter, from Johnstown to the springs of Saratoga. Late in life and ill, he yielded to the hopes of his red brothers that these waters might be ; curative. We picture him on a forest trail where now a paved turn- pike passes through Broadalbin, Barkersville and East Galway to Saratoga. No other local result of his career is so notable as his agency in bringing large numbers of Scotch from the north of Ireland, to place their stamp upon parts of the Fulton and Montgomery counties. He is still the historic figure of our region. In Johnstown are his grave and his monument. North of the Mohawk river the early inhabitants were largely Scotch Irish and Scotch. We have noted Sir William Johnson’s activity in securing some of these settlements. The names Perth, Galway, and Broadalbin are memorials of some of these migrations. Reid (’01, p. 239) is authority for the statement that 400 kinsmen of the men active in the bloody affair of Glencoe settled in the valley of the Mohawk. Charlton and Galway were settled by the Scotch in the years just before the Revolution. Some of them came from Galloway, hence the township name “Galway.” This town was formed from Ballston in 1792 and was first called “New Galloway.” Slightly later others came and settled southward from the men of Galloway, in what is now Charlton. This settlement then became known as “Scotch Street.” Gilchrist, Bell, McKinney and McWil- liams will be recognized as names appropriate to this group. Bunyan, GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 93 Hume and Gordon are other names of the same sort. Colonies from Rhode Island and also from New Jersey settled in Galway. Thus early began in our region those national mixtures of neighbors and of biological inheritance which so long and so widely have charac- terized the United States. The hilly and mountainous towns of Providence and Edinburg were more attractive to settlers in those early days when isolation counted less in human feeling than it does today. Sawmills, grist- mills and tanneries based on the water power, forests and hilly fields, found active business and built up a diversity which is not possible today. The period of abandoned farms, town life and mass produc- tion was yet far away. John Sumner came from Connecticut to the Sacandaga river in Edinburg and his son John built a sawmill at Batchellerville before 1800. The father was a cousin of the statesman, Charles Sumner. A descendant of this household who is still living in Edinburg, was for long the proprietor of a lumber mill and has recently communi- cated information to the author of this report. Another settler in this town, possibly the first, was a son of General Stark, the victor in the battle of Bennington. The names of town officers in the towns of Providence and Edin- burg for a century show the prevalence of English names; one finds himself there beyond the domain of the Dutch, the German and the Scotchman. These items give samples of what happened in the evolution of the early population of our region. They are not given as outlining local history but as illustrating the mixed beginnings of life in a new environment. The special period of the New Englander in New York did not arrive until after the Revolution. Then the men of the East began to pour in. Some were attracted by confiscated lands of the Loyal- ists, and soon a great procession was crossing our area to central New York, to the Genesee country, to Ohio and beyond. Battle Grounds All land west of Albany, until 1772, belonged to Albany county. In that year under the influence of Sir William Johnson, Tryon county was formed. It extended up the Mohawk past the colonial settlements and into the wilderness. Northwestward it found its limit on the shores of Lake Ontario and the banks of the St Lawrence river. The eastern border of Tryon county was the eastern limit of Montgomery, Fulton and Hamilton counties. The name was changed to Montgomery county in 1784, because Governor Tryon was 94 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM hated for his British sympathies. General Richard Montgomery, killed at Quebec in 1775, was honored in the choice of the new name. The county was reduced in size from time to time and assumed its present limits in 1838 by the setting off of Fulton county. Tryon county in American history is a synonym for the strife of neighbors and the shedding of blood in the border wars. Before noting the sites of Revolutionary conflict we shall refer to one well- authenticated battleground of Indian against Indian. Above Hoffman Ferry rises a mass of hills in the town of Glen- ville, attaining a maximum altitude of 1097 feet. Wolf hollow cuts through these hills and here the Chaugtanoonda creek enters the Mohawk. This gulf marks the line of Hoffman fault and by its shaded roadway are the rocks tilted in that disturbance of ancient geological time. The south end of the uplift reached to the river and was carved into a rocky cliff in grading for the New York Central Railway (fig. 16). The great hill was known to the red men as Towereune. The Mohicans in 1669 tried to reconquer the territory from which the Mohawks had driven them. They attacked their old enemy at Caughnawaga (Fonda) and were driven off. They made their stand on the Glenville hills which offered a defensive position by reason of the faulted spur that descended to the river. The Mohicans were here attacked, defeated and many of them destroyed by the fierce fighters of the Mohawk tribe. The Mohawks called this spur Kinaquariones, and gave this name to the battle fought there. The first deed of violence done in our region, indeed in the whole Mohawk valley, took place at Caughnawaga in 1775. Colonel Guy Johnson, in company with other Loyalists, made a violent speech. Jacob Sammons defied Johnson and was knocked down by him, bearing thus the first scar of the years of border warfare. Sampson Sammons, the father of Jacob, was a member of the Tryon County Committee of Safety and they as a family shared in the battle of Oriskany and the sufferings of a Canadian dungeon. Early in 1776, 3000 patriot soldiers were reviewed on the ice of the river, prepara- tory to a movement on Johnstown. This is said to have been the largest Revolutionary force ever assembled in the valley. The Mohawk valley for many miles in the vicinity of Tribes Hill and Fonda was raided in May 1780 by Sir John Johnson, with Tories and Indians. It was a scene of fire and massacre which makes it impossible for the people of the valley to recall the son of Sir William Johnson other than with horror. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 95 Currytown is a small village about three miles south of the Mohawk river at the Noses. On June 30, 1781, this hamlet was raided by 300 Indians and a few Loyalists. Fire, massacre and capture were the means used. The invading party was pursued and defeated at Sharon Springs, which is several miles outside of the region of our study. The same autumn, 600 men, Indians and Loyalists, came down the valley and did a work of killing and fire at Warrensbush, the very place where Sir William Johnson had begun his American career. Retiring before colonial troops that came to the rescue, the British force took up a position at Johnstown. Here was fought a bloody battle, the last Revolutionary battle in New York. The contestants did not know that Cornwallis had a few days before surrendered at Yorktown. In the pursuit by the victorious colonists, Walter Butler, one of the most abhorred men in American history, was killed. It was in the immediate valley of the Mohawk therefore, and localities within a short distance from the river, that raiding and fighting occurred. In any war affecting the northeastern states the Mohawk, Hudson and Champlain valleys would be strategic ground. At the end of the Revolution there were in Tryon county, sparsely as it had been settled, 380 widows, 2000 fatherless children, 12,000 abandoned farms and the sites of 700 burned buildings. The Larger Centers of Population Geography in the schools of Europe and for a shorter period in those of our own country has become something more than a descrip- tion of the courses of rivers, of the trend and height of mountain chains, of the size and industries of cities, of the products of mines and fields. It is now primarily a study of relations and causes, of the adjustment of human life to the lands, the waters and their resources. Environment is a composite of relief, soils, climate, natural routes, the resources of the forests and the superficial parts of the earth’s crust. If we enumerate these things, it is that we may trace the outcomes of life and society so far as they proceed from physical conditions. Along with the physical environment there come the movements and mingling of races and nationalities in their historic order. To a certain degree geography takes account of these con- siderations also, without departing from its proper field. In the above sense any village, with its site and surroundings, its houses, churches, schools, general store and small mechanical crafts, becomes a worthy theme for intensive study and leads into the field of large relations and general principles. 96 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM It is upon considerations thus briefly stated, that we give and analyze some of the facts about the cities and larger villages in our field of study. We have space for but a brief outline, a sort of skeleton which might be clothed with flesh and given full life and expression. In countless ways the serious reader who may be a resident, knowing and loving the place and its life from childhood, can fill in with details not known to the present writer. In particular it is hoped that teachers of geography and of history may be helped to ground the study of State, Nation and the world at large in those humble but not less significant things that can be found at home. The features of the physical environment, the historical geography of municipality, town and county, the growth of industries, the changes in population — all these features as related to any center here described offer material for class work and goals for excursions and observations in the field. Amsterdam Villages along the Mohawk were commonly located at the mouth of lateral streams. In such situations there was usually an extension of the ordinary flood plain and a larger area of tillable soil. There was water power also, afforded by streams which were not too large to be harnessed and controlled by the pioneer. In the general reju- venation of surface and blocking of the ancient mature drainage of preglacial time, we have the explanation of the abrupt descent of water within short distances. Illustrations of these principles in our area we found at Patter- sonville, Cranesville, Amsterdam, Port Jackson, Fort Johnson, Fort Hunter and Fonda. The beginnings at the mouth of Chuctenunda creek were not made until settlements had been established at War- rensbush, a settlement on the lands of Sir Peter Warren, uncle of Sir William Johnson, south of the Mohawk river, east of Port Jack- son, which has long ceased to exist; Cranesville, and Fort Johnson. Cranesville was settled by Philip Groot, or Groat, in 1730. A grist- mill was built at once and is said to have supplied flour to a dis- tance of 50 miles. William Johnson, afterward Sir William, came as a young man to the Warren estate south of the river in 1738. About 1742 he built Fort Johnson and erected there a sawmill. A gristmill was added in 1744 and Sir William lived there until 1763, when he re- moved to the manor house which he built at Johnstown. The first settler where Amsterdam now is was Albert Veeder or Vedder. He built a sawmill and a gristmill and the place was first called Veeders Mills, then Veedersburg, and after 1808, Amsterdam, GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 97 using the name of the township which had been set off some years before. The Chuctenunda creek is many miles long, has ample waters and descends as a swift torrent over rocks from which it long ago stripped off the cover of drift. It did not, like the creeks at Fort Johnson and Cranesville, reoccupy a mature valley. Hence it joins the Mohawk not at grade but by a dash down a rocky slope. It thus concentrates its fall, and power sites stand close together. The name refers to the rocks, not probably those of its bed, but to outcrops on the north bank of the Mohawk near its junction of the waters. These outcrops were a traditional place of shelter to migrating Indians before the white man’s advent. Amsterdam began the nineteenth century with ioo inhabitants, was incorporated in 1831 and became a city in 1885. The river was crossed by a ferry until 1821, when the first bridge was built at that point. One writer, on the beginnings of Amsterdam, says of the Chucte- nunda neighborhood that “the territory was barren, and bare rock was more in evidence than fertile soil.” To the west of the “cross- roads,” the land was in the main “sterile, rocky and swampy.” This must have been west of the present intersection of Main and Mar- ket streets. There were boulders no doubt, unremoved since the Iroquois waters freed them from finer drift, and the surface was boggy, a widespread condition following the glacial obstruction of drainage, which we fail to realize now that forests are down, the sun shines in and man has graded and drained the land. Rev. John Taylor visited Amsterdam in 1802 after some develop- ment had taken place, observed the place from a different angle, calling the Chuctenunda “a very fertile and useful stream,” and pro- ceeded to enumerate the oil mills, gristmills, the sawmills and “one iron forge.” It is not difficult to see why Amsterdam has become the major community of the region which we have under observation. It was on a route of transportation, which, taking account of all its closely parallel lines, is not equalled elsewhere in America. It had the most ample water power in the district. This power fell far short of future needs, but it set the town upon its industrial career. As a market town it is centered upon an area of soils derived from lime- stones and black shales, an area which extends both ways along the river and for some miles to the north and south. Here a bridge was early built across the Mohawk and soon after, the Erie Canal was constructed along the south shore. Port Jack- 4 98 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM son became a depot on the canal and was a convenient port for Amsterdam. ihe form assumed by the city in its growth has responded to physical conditions. Forced by expansion, it has crept up the steep slopes which were made by the undermining of Iroquois waters, reaching farther north along the water power sites of its turbulent stream. Nature has not made it easy to go from river to upland, but has fostered east and west elongations on the narrow riparian strip until now solid settlements reach from Fort Johnson to a point far below the old four corners. It is six miles from Sir William Johnson’s mansion to Cranesville and the ancient holdings of the Philip Groat family. At least three-fourths of this distance is now filled with homes and shops. Paved roads now run east and west on both banks of the river and very directly reach Saratoga Springs, Northville and the Adi- rondacks, Gloversville and Johnstown. Surfaced roads likewise lead over the southern plateau to the Cherry valley turnpike and the northern Catskills. The development of transportation will find place in a later section of this report. As with most cities in a glaciated region, Amsterdam depends closely upon conditions of the drift for its municipal supply of water. The growing populations of the city and the adjoining districts have produced increasing contamination of local waters and made neces- sary more remote sources of supply. The wells and pipelogs of a local water company supplied the village until 1881. Then Rogers, McQueen and Bunn creeks were taken into requisition, the two former unnamed on the topographic map, uniting in the stream that enters the Mohawk at Fort Johnson. Bunn creek joins the Chuc- tenunda near the Sanford Carpet Mills. In 1889, when more water and more perfect sanitary conditions were required, Hans creek was selected. This stream has many miles of flow through a forested region in the town of Providence. There are three reservoirs at a distance of 15 miles from the city, Glen Wild, Cook’s reservoir, and Little Round lake. They are fed from a watershed of about 23 square miles, owned by the city, the total capacity of the reservoirs being 1,400,000,000 gallons. A 24-inch pipe, with gravity flow, brings the water to a distributing reservoir in the city and to 65 miles of water mains. In the geological sections of this volume we have made many references to the various forms of the glacial drift in and near Amsterdam. Many of these are open to the observation of school groups or other interested persons. The principal cemeteries, Green GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 99 Hill, St Mary’s and Fairview, are all located upon the belt of washed drift on the upper hillside and as we have seen, show condi- tions of deposition in glacial waters. Sands with porous glacial subsoils are often sought for places of burial, and here we have no exception, although, as we have seen, the conditions of deposition were so shifting that the character of subsoils at any particular point is not surely predictable. Some exposures of drift are much obscured by the wash and the plant growth of many years, as along the Yankee hill cut and in the great pit north of Guy Park avenue, but many localities of glacial and physiographic interest are still available. Such are the gorges above Cranesville, Hoffman, Fort Johnson, and along the Danascara creek, all these being north of the river. South of the river is the postglacial gorge above Port Jackson, and the great ravine three miles eastward. In Port Jackson are the fresh sections of brick clay, whose fine particles settled in waters that still bore icebergs from no remote glacier. Silts in lake waters made the fine platform which constitutes the southern part of the Antlers golf grounds. The teacher will not fail to find in the drift, the glacially scratched, or water-worn fragments of the limestones of the valley and the cobblestones and boulders which betray their Adirondack origin. Fonda and Fultonville The Indians chose their site in the eastern end of what is now Fonda and they called their village Caughnawaga, a name apparently referring to a rift or rock in the river. They chose with their usual keen sense of geographic values. There were flood plain lands on both the Mohawk and Cayudutta, and similarly easy of cultivation was the Fonda wash plain just westward. They were at the opening of a route northward to the fishing and hunting of Canada lake, the Sacandaga river and the Adirondack forests. When the white man came he found the further advantage of good mill sites on the Cayudutta. The first settlers were Dutch and they came between the years 1715 and 1720. They began at Caughnawaga and extended their lands and houses westward toward the mouth of the tributary stream from the north. Among the earliest Dutch names were Fonda, Wemple and Vrooman. Douw Fonda, who was killed and scalped at his own home in a Revolu- tionary raid, had a trading post where is now the Montgomery county fair ground between the New York Central Railway and the Mohawk river. 100 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Fonda’s name was given to the village and his son, Jelles Fonda, was even more widely known as a trader and influential citizen. It was here that Jacob Sammons had his encounter with Colonel Guy Johnson. After the close of the Revolution Fonda ranked with Herkimer as one of the two chief places on the north bank of the Mohawk river west of Schenectady. It had better access to the north than the site of Amsterdam, which was settled later, and its fields were wider and more easily tilled. The factors of more available water power and larger human initiative later sent Amsterdam ahead in the race. The permanence and growth of the village were assured between 1830 and 1840. The Utica and Schenectady Railway was completed and Fonda became more than ever a point of departure for the towns of Fulton county and in later years for the hunting grounds and summer resorts in the north. In 1838 Fonda became the county seat of Montgomery county. The teacher of geography in Fonda and its vicinity has available many good illustrations of the principles of the subject. Such are the stream phenomena of the Mohawk and Cayudutta, the wash plain west of Fonda, “Teaburg” in Fonda, the ancient landslip to the eastward, Danascara gorge and the gorge of the Noses, the great escarpment and the alluvial cones near Yosts. On the human side there are the several means of transportation by land and water, the local industries, and several historic sites and buildings among which, near at hand, is a structure suggestive of the border wars, the home of the hated Butler family. Still another unit in this group of geographical and historical facts is the water system of Fonda. Its source of supply is four miles west of the village, including a group of springs and a small stream, all of which originate high up on the rocks of the “Big Nose.’’ An earlier system was installed about 1890, and the present system came into use after the opening of the present century. Both of the principal burial places are on the high-level deposits of washed drift, one being on the Fonda wash plain west of Cayudutta creek, and the other on a remnant of deposit of the same nature north of the village. Fultonville started and made its growth because its site is across the Mohawk river from Fonda. A ford and later a bridge established its communication with the route of travel and mail carriage, run- ning east and west through Fonda and northward to Johnstown. Very early its only house was an inn where traveling Indians made GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK IOI their stopping place, and from which the mails reached the routes north of the river. The main development came with the construction of the Erie canal, which made it a port and depot for Fonda and the Cayudutta basin as well as the chief trading place in the town of Glen. It became the southern terminus of the plank road which was laid in 1849 through Fonda to Johnstown. Johnstown and Gloversville It is an aid to brevity to treat these cities together. They are closely related to each other in situation, history and industries. Each merges into the other along the same small stream. Each center under the spur of larger population and growing needs secured direct communication by rail with Amsterdam, Schenectady and Albany. Taken together their names are everywhere known and they perhaps offer the best illustration in America of community concentration on a single industry. On the fringe of the larger and younger city is the settlement bearing a designation that is older than the name of either. In the physical features there is some diversity. Johnstown has many of its streets on a great drumlin, at whose base run the prin- cipal business thoroughfares. The central parts of Gloversville are on the sands of the interlobate moraine. On the north and west Gloversville streets, at least several of them, run up the slopes of drumlins. Johnstown has several drumlins near at hand. In the east- ern section Gloversville is occupying flat ground that seems to have been deposited in rather temporary waters, perhaps held there for a time by barriers of stagnant ice. These contrasts and resemblances between the sites of the two cities can be seen by observing the glacial map. To go east or west from Johnstown is to pass among drumlin contours. To go directly east from Gloversville is to enter the semidesert, which in a narrow belt heads toward Broadalbin. North and northwest of Gloversville one finds a great sea of drumloid contours, although many of the hills are not colored on the map as drumlins. Around and west of Meco and up and over Clip hill stretches the confused morainic aggregate, as we follow it westward. It carries poor soil and poor houses with it, as it rises over the Noses escarpment and leaves the quadrangle. Gloversville is near the Adirondack goals of travel, toward which hard roads run out to Caroga and Canada lakes, to Mountain lake and about Bleecker and to Northville. Both cities are on an ancient trail that led up the Cayudutta and on to the Sacandaga and the wilds of what was to become Hamilton county. 102 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Both cities lead us back to Sir William Johnson, through the Kingsborough patent of 20,000 acres of wilderness, which he and others, doubtlessly he chiefly, obtained. Johnstown derives its name from his and is far more directly related to him, since Gloversville as a municipality dates many years after his death. A Geographical History of New York published about 1850 mentions Kingsboro, then Gloversville, and gives to each a population of 400. Johnstown was settled by Sir William Johnson in 1759 but did not receive its name until 1770. Sir William leased or sold lands to more than 100 families. Among them were Dutch, German, Irish and Scotch immigrants. Although but a few miles from the Mohawk, the dominance of the Dutch here gives way and the national origins make a different composition of the population. Johnstown, although the residence of its founder during a period much shorter than the time of his life on the Mohawk, has the most numerous memorials of his presence. This was natural because here he established a manorial seat, in the years of his widest influence and greatest wealth. Here therefore we find Johnson Hall, erected in 1762, the courthouse dating from 1772, the jail of the same date and some other buildings erected after Johnson’s death but before the end of the century. Here also are his grave and his monument. The battle of Johnstown was fought within the limits of the present city. The manorial house, Johnson Hall, belongs to the State of New York and is in the custody of the Johnstown Historical Society. Johnstown is surrounded by fertile agricultural lands, of rolling surfaces and very commonly molded into drumlins or drumloid forms. Across its site, along what is now a branch of Cayudutta creek, flowed the outlet waters of glacial Sacandaga lake, and the point of emergence from the lake at the head of Skinner creek is but six miles east of Johnstown. Gloversville has abundance of arable land on the north and south, but to the east and west are the sandy hills of the interlobate moraine. Neither city has depended in the main on the trade of the environing farms and villages, for remote domestic and foreign trade in skins and gloves has given them wide commercial relations. Yet we are told quite amusingly by a writer of the middle of the last century that Fulton county had “no commerce, from the want of navigable streams.” Yet in the same paragraph was recognized the manu- facture of leather, gloves, flour, lumber and paper. The Johnstown water supply proceeds from the Noses uplift, but from higher altitudes than for Fonda. The Warren, Cold Brook GLACIAL geology of the lower mohawk 103 and Cork Center reservoirs have altitudes of 924 to 1054 feet above^ sea level, while the street levels in Johnstown range from 650 to 750 feet. The two first-named reservoirs are smaller and join the city by a ten-inch main. The Cork Center connecting main has a diameter of 16 inches. The two supplies are independent of each other and afford ample pressures. In an interesting relation to the sandy morainic soil of the watershed, the city is planting the surface with tens of thousands of Scotch pine. Gloversville has had a municipal water system since 1877. Various works in different years have been built on Rice creek, Mayfield creek and Port creek. It will be seen by the map that their watersheds lie north of the city along the base of the Adirondacks, the distances of the works from the city being from three to ten miles. The reservoirs are from 280 to 345 feet above the city and are eleven in number. The origin of the glove industry and its relation to this environ- ment will be noticed in the section on the rise of industries. Broadalbin and Northville The village of Broadalbin rests mainly on a platform of washed drift. On the south are the flood plains of the Kenneatto creek and beyond the creek, slopes rise to the wide surfaces of the Perth till plain. On the north is a belt of hills by which the interlobate moraine continues eastward. Broadalbin will be barely a half mile east of the southern extension of the Sacandaga reservoir. The site has long been favorable for settlement because of its connections by trail and roadway. It is on the direct route northward from Amsterdam to Fish House and the Sacandaga river. Through this site or close to it ran the trail from Johnstown and the west to Saratoga Springs, a route now followed by a paved and much frequented highway. It has the crossroads type of situation. Broadalbin well illustrates the national diversity of the pioneers. The first settler in the neighborhood was a German, Henry Stoner, who came in 1770. He was killed and scalped by a red man and his son, Nicolas Stoner, became famous as hunter and Indian hater. The village had its beginning just before the Revolution, with such names as Bowman, Putnam, Salisbury and Cady. Later came Samuel Demorest, a Hollander, and Alexander Murray, from Scot- land. Chalmers, Blair, Campbell and Stewart are other early names, and then the community was infused with men of English lineage from New England. The various names of the village tell the same story. At first it was Kenneatto, then it was long known as Fonda’s Bush (Fonda’s 104 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Woods) from Jelles Fonda, the aggressive Dutchman of Fonda. Through Dutch influence in the Legislature it was incorporated as Rawsonville, from an early physician, but the place was never organized under the name. A prior name, given to the post office in 1804, gained the ascendancy. This was Broadalbin, from “Breadalbane,” the name of an ancient jurisdiction and family in Perthshire, Scotland. Northville has a situation whose physiography is unusual. It is bordered west and east by the Sacandaga and one of its branches. On the north rises a mountain spur. It stands on a terrace which is part of the delta of glacial Lake Sacandaga. North of the village at the base of the mountain is a high sand plain on which is the village cemetery. Across the river westward, Sacandaga Park stands on another piece of the delta. The river has cut away the sands and gravels which once joined these two sites. North of the village, along the river, is the head of the delta, with its accompanying moraines, as already described. A mile west of Sacandaga Park are the moraine and spillway at the head or southern end of Gifford valley. On every side except the north Northville will look out upon the waters of the Sacandaga reservoir. A short distance up the hill eastward, also a mile north, the interested student will find glacial striae on the bed rocks near the roadway. It was natural that Northville should be settled later than the other main centers. Its two principal streets were laid out in the last decade of the eighteenth century. A gristmill, a sawmill and a tannery were wholly appropriate as early industries. In particular Northville later became the center for an immense log trade, for it was the gateway to the forests of Hamilton county and by it on the Sacandaga waters logs moved to the Hudson river, Glens Falls and beyond. Northville is still the gateway to northern forests, now not so much for logs to pass out as for men to pass in. The tourist and the summer resident reach northern resorts by way of Northville. So many also sojourn in Northville and in Sacandaga Park that we may properly speak of the summer resort industry as definitely engaging the interest and providing the support of many of the permanent residents. Conditions of uncertainty have now arisen through condemnation proceedings and the changes in land and water that will follow from the making of the new reservoir. The municipal water supply comes from a lake in the hills two miles north-northeast of the village. A similar supply of soft mountain water is drawn by Sacandaga Park from a small lake three miles to the westward. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 105 Soils and Agriculture In the human geography of any region the basal fact is its agri- culture. Here also is the bond of most intimate dependence of man upon those physical conditions which largely shape his life. We must recall to the reader the large facts of relief which found place in our account of the physiography. In the northern parts of the two northern quadrangles are large areas of the Adirondack crystalline rocks and of only partially defor- ested land. In the southern parts of the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles we find a sandstone plateau. On the west are the uplifted lands and steep scarps of the Noses fault. On the east are the high and rugged hill masses of Rotterdam and Princetown. South of the Mohawk river and in Glenville on the north we find the uplift of the Hoffman fault and the highlands lying to the eastward. The favorable lands for tillage form a central area on both sides of the Mohawk. Geologically the fields of this area rest upon and have developed from formations of limestone and shale which have afforded soil elements in richness and abundance. This is true by reason of the character of the local bed rock and because the drift formations have tended to concentrate on the lower levels along the Mohawk, extending a short distance south of the river and to a greater distance northward. In sketching agricultural conditions we must remember also that the altitudes of the surrounding highlands have given them a severer climate and a shorter growing season than belongs to the central area. The latter has been favored by the larger growth of population and better means of transportation, affording both local and more remote facilities for marketing the products of the soil. Viewed in reference to several parts of counties included in our area, we observe that Montgomery county has its eastern half, or somewhat more than half, in our field of study. The same is true of Fulton county. Montgomery county has much the greater area favorable for tillage. In Saratoga county our area includes parts of the towns of Galway and Charlton, where agricultural condi- tions are favorable. In Fulton county the same may be said of the towns of Johnstown, Mayfield, Broadalbin and Perth. Some sec- tions of the towns of Glenville and Rotterdam in Schenectady county furnish good farm lands. Here are included bottom lands of the Mohawk, early utilized by both Indians and whites up to the county line near Hoffman Ferry. io6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Montgomery county is the only county in which our area has a share, which has been subjected to a survey by the Bureau of Soils of the United States Department of Agriculture (Lee and Louns- bury, ’09). The discussion which here first follows is there- fore confined to the eastern portion of Montgomery county, extend- ing from the eastern boundary to the uplift of the Noses. The authors of the survey here cited say that Montgomery county, in the heart of the Mohawk valley, “doubtlessly represents better than any other one county the soil and agricultural conditions of this region.” Both the Indians and the early whites were attracted to the region by its natural fertility, its beauty and its accessibility along the trails and waters of the Mohawk valley. The Indian fields were on the flats and there were a few orchards on the uplands, comparable in character if not in numbers to the Iroquois orchards of the Finger lakes region. Flax and wool were early products in days when each family must provide for most of its needs. The maximum of sheep production was in i860, followed by a long decline. As in so many other farm regions of the East, wheat has since 1880 yielded to other crops, urgently required by the growing population, while the breadstuffs are more cheaply secured from western fields. In 1850 the chief grain crops were wheat, oats, corn, rye, buckwheat and barley. Barley and rye are now little raised, and the same is true of hops. Montgomery once was counted with Otsego, Chenango and other counties of eastern-central New York as prolific in this crop. Oats are still the largest grain crop. Corn also has a great acre- age, but much of it is grown for ensilage and not for the dry grain. Buckwheat retains its place because it is well adapted to the soils and climate of the high southern areas. Hay is a leading crop because the dairy has become the dominant phase of agriculture. Before i860 butter and cheese were the chief products of dairying, then made in the homes. Factories came in, transportation was improved, the cities of the Hudson valley grew and now the indus- try is mainly for the production of milk for shipment to greater New York and the cities of the middle Hudson valley. The three cities of our area and its villages have a population of 80,000 or more and offer an important market. The dairy requirements now demand a milk supply of 12 months, without the old-time cessation during the winter. Silo corn and improved herds have made this possible, The soils and climate favor GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 107 grass and silo corn rather than grain. Thus we have a twofold geographic adaptation, to the capacity of nature and the demands of man. The Mohawk series of soils is regarded as specially suited to forage crops, and the Volusia silt loam is well adapted to buckwheat (fig. 64). Before we proceed to a brief notice of certain soil types and areas, as outlined in the Soil Survey of Montgomery County, it must be said that the report should be read with qualification in many pas- sages in which the glacier and its waters are used to explain the origin of the soils. These passages are numerous, specific local evidence is not given, and erroneous impressions will follow implicit reliance upon them. The authors assume that the motion of the Mohawk glacier was from west to east. In the light of our previous presentation we need not comment upon this error. Further, there can be very little “ residual” soil in our area. The soils so considered are without doubt mainly derived from weathered glacial till. It seems to be assumed that most drift is foreign to the locality, whereas we now know that most of it is of local derivation. This principle is over- looked when it is stated that there is “ no glacial drift upon the surface.” It is also probable that in regions of thick drift the underlying rocks have contributed more material to the soils than in regions of thin drift. The pages of the survey also place far too much emphasis upon the influence of glacial waters upon the soils of the upland areas. It is overlooked that the ice deposited much sandy till, and that strings of sand or pockets of coarse waste do not require the presence of a body of static water. In general the authors of the survey have sought to place in the Mohawk soil series, soils derived from the weathering of the “ glacial mantle,” while drift worked over by water is assigned to the Dunkirk series. The last principle is much overstressed in the report. It is possible in a general way to see a relation between some of the leading soil types as depicted on the soil map and the bodies of glacial and postglacial material as set forth in our glacial map. The Genesee fine sandy loam stands for an alluvial soil and is therefore mostly found along the Mohawk river and Schoharie creek, in the flood plains of both and the terraces of the latter. These arq io8 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM the most valuable farm areas in the region. To the Dunkirk grav- elly loam are referred coarse soils as are found on the Iroquois gravels east of the Noses. Mohawk loam, Mohawk clay loam and Mohawk silt loam are names applied to various soils along the Mo- hawk, especially on the south, and reaching several miles into the uplands. They are all mainly derived from the underlying till, which in turn had its origin mainly in the limestones and black shales of the region. The last named marks a passage from the Mohawk clay loam to the Volusia silt loam, which is a pale, thin soil formed mostly of the thin glacial till of the sandstone uplands in the southern part of the district. We have referred to the Dunkirk gravelly loam. Examples of Dunkirk coarse sand are cited as occurring on the Fonda wash plain and at Tribes Hill. Dunkirk fine sandy loam is mapped in many areas on both sides of the Mohawk, back for some miles. These soils even on the higher ground are ascribed to reworking in high-level, temporary lakes. This interpretation is more than doubtful, as these soils have in most of the upland areas been devel- oped through the weathering of the till. These remarks carry no criticism of the characterization of the soil, or of the agricultural adaptations and uses which are described or advised in the report. The agricultural conditions of Montgomery county are well sum- marized in a letter to the writer from Chester W. Austen, county agricultural agent, and his statement is here reproduced : With regard to our special farming conditions, Montgomery county is devoted very intensively to the dairy industry. As you may know and as you will also see from the folder, our soils are generally of the heavy type which endows our farms with those types of soils so desirable to hay, grain and good pasturage. Be- cause our soils are heavy they are perhaps less desirable for seme of the more diversified crop growing as in some of the surrounding areas like Albany and Schenectady counties. In the past Mont- gomerv county has been a very extensive hay-growing region from which have been shipped thousands of tons of hay. Now that the hay market has tapered off, more of the one-time standing meadows are being devoted to more extensive grazing and the dairy industry is enlarging. Hay and grain and corn are being grown as always to make the farms more self-sustaining to the dairy industry. As a supplement to these crops, the Farm Bureau has instituted a pro- gram of growing mixed grains. Where up until five years ago practically all of the grain that was grown was oats, today we have GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 109 thousands of acres of the grain mixture of oats, barley and peas. This crop is being extensively raised to reduce the farmer’s feed bill. Years ago this was a large cheese-producing section. Today it is all fluid milk. This is the transition that has taken place in the dairy industry in this county. At the present time we have ten or twelve shipping stations which are daily shipping out fluid milk. In one particular center, namely, Fort Plain, the fluid milk business for that town alone approximates more than a million dollars annually. This gives you some picture of the immensity of the income from fluid milk. There is but one cheese factory in the county at the present time and I understand that this is its last season, so that practically 100 per cent of the dairy business will forthwith represent a fluid milk product. This, in a brief sense, gives you some picture of the type of farming in the county. At the present there are about 30,000 dairy cows in the county and approximately 2000 farms. We may observe finally as regards Montgomery county that while it is small in area, its agriculture in several respects shows high totals per square mile. This is notably true in the value of farm property and farm products, in the number of dairy cows, in tons of hay and bushels of oats. As a whole, few counties of the State surpass it in intensive farming. Sundry Natural Resources When we regard human life as affected by the glacial invasion, we think first of soils. Upon these the kinds and distribution of crops largely depend, always taking account of climate and not neg- lecting the distinctive human elements of taste, need and competi- tive producers. Transportation also enters in and this depends both on natural features and upon human skill and initiative. Thus we see how difficult it is to evaluate so-called geographic influences. Under agriculture we have not included the forests and yet more and more we are learning, and properly, to consider trees as a crop. The native forests of the Adirondack sections of our two northern quadrangles have in the past yielded large amounts of lumber, and the Sacandaga river was an important means of transport for north- ern logs. The supply, as everywhere in the East, is much depleted and lumbering in Fulton county has been decreasing for several years. The reservations by the State and the purchase of camps and estates account in part for this decay of an industry. We are informed that it costs more to get out the native lumber than to de- liver western lumber with all charges paid at Northville. Thus it no NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM is with lumber as with wheat : it can be produced, but not economi- cally, in the face of mammoth production and facile carriage. There is some lumbering in Fulton county, the product being mainly used for minor structures and the making of baskets. Transport is by truck and wagon. Glacial agencies have very directly conditioned the fragmental materials of stone used in the construction of buildings, roads and other public works. We have already named several openings for sand and gravel on or near the Mohawk river. Among these are pits at Fultonville, Amsterdam, Pattersonville, near Rector’s Station and the Flaverly pit at the eastern border of the quadrangle. There has also been considerable use of the kame deposits of Glenville and of the morainic sands in the vicinity of Gloversville. The bed rocks which may be utilized have no special relation to glacial changes except that in some situations the preglacial residual deposits have been cleaned off and the oxidized and less desirable surface rocks have been removed, leaving the usable beds exposed, or at least near the surface. The most extensive utilization of the hard rocks is at the crushing plant across the river from Cranesville. Many quarries have been abandoned by reason of the growth of the concrete industry. Several quarries in the Broadalbin quadrangle are named in Miller’s account of the rock geology of that area (see bibliography). The waters of the region, whether in the form of streams, lakes, reservoirs or ground water, are closely dependent for their quality and distribution upon glacial conditions. Reference has been made to the water supply of several communities, which are all easily ac- cessible to the higher and forested grounds, where the terranes are in general so free from lime as to give supplies of relatively soft water. The reverse is true of many small villages and farms where the ground water of wells and springs has taken into solution much lime from calcareous drift. It is permissible here to include the conception of landscape, whether this expresses the more common aspects of plain, hill and valley, or the more striking features usually denoted by the word scenery. It is not amiss to consider landscape and scenic conditions as natural resources, not forgetting that these features have higher than economic values. Such resources are abundant in our area, and their varieties of altitude, of field and forest, of lake and moun- tain, are accessible by good roads to many millions of people. No GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK III doubt several thousands in our area win their living, or supplement other income by what we need not hesitate to call the summer resort industry. Early Roads In a region of strong relief such as we have under review, the major lines of movement usually follow the principal valleys. These valleys were in existence long before the glacial invasion. This is known to the technical student and can not be too strongly emphasized in the mind of the general reader. The ice greatly modified the surface in detail but did not revolutionize it. In our area the most striking change was the diversion of the Sacandaga river. The character of roads and their detailed courses have, however, been closely dependent upon the glacial drift, its forms of relief and the nature and variety of its materials. This was especially true of the early lines of land communication, which were nothing but dirt roads, dependent upon soil, subsoil and natural drainage. The newer roads are less dependent upon the local conditions except as local materials are used and as special problems of construction arise. We have already given a brief account of the Indian trails. The early roads departed little from the courses of these primitive paths. In a description of the country between Oswego and Albany in 1757 (O’Callaghan, 1819, p. 528-33), we are told in reference to the north bank of the Mohawk, of a “high road (from the west) which is passable for carts for 12 leagues to Col. Johnson’s Mansion.” Within this distance, which was really about 30 miles, were 500 houses, those on the river being mostly of stone. This points to the exposed limestones and abundant loose slabs of thin rock along the Mohawk zone. The people were said to be Germans (Palatines) and there was, as we have already seen, a mill near Johnson’s house (Fort Johnson). There was a “good road” from this point to Schenectady. “All kinds of vehicles pass over it.” Here the people were Dutch. We leave the reader to imagine just how “good” this road was. The road south of the river west of Fort Flunter is called “pretty good,” for “carriages pass over it.” The road continues to Schenec- tady and here also the people were Dutch. We here reproduce from the documentary history a section of Southier’s map of the province of New York in 1779 (fig.^io). II 2 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Figure io From map of New York in 1779, dedicated to General William Tryon. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 113 We include territory for several miles outside of the four quad- rangles, the better to show the relations of the streams and of such roads and settlements as then existed. On the west we include the mouth of Caroga creek and on the east Schenectady and Long (Ballston) lake. Northward we take in the headwaters of the Sacandaga river and its junction with the Hudson. Southward a section of the middle Schoharie valley is included and the highlands of the Berne and Schoharie quadrangles. Amsterdam has not appeared and there is no settlement as yet by the mouth of the Chuctenunda creek. South of the river was the now defunct settlement of Warrensborough. Fort Johnson is on the map, also Fort Hunter and to the westward is Caughnawaga. It is too early for Fonda. Johnstown, Kingsborough and Mayfield are present, but not Gloversville, or Fonda’s Bush. Duanesburgh appears in the southeast. We find the roads extending continuously west of Schenectady on both sides of the river. There is a road from Fort Hunter south over the hills east of Schoharie creek and from the Mohawk, where Sprakers now is, southeast over the hills (by the present Rural Grove) to the Schoharie valley. Another road runs from Schenectady to the Schoharie valley along Norman kill. On the north a road led from Fort Johnson to the Sacandaga river, joined at Johnstown by a road from Caughnawaga. Caughnawaga and Johnstown were joined to Stone Arabia. On the map Auriesville is Aries Kill and the northern nose is Anthony Nose. The north shore road was known as the “King’s Highway.” Referring to this and the other roads in 1775, a competent authority says, “Without exception they were bad, leading as they did over high hills to avoid swamps and passing through dense forests. They were either filled with boulders or were sloughs of mud” (Frey, S. L., ’05, p. 139, 140). In 1792 conditions must have been better, at least a traveler toward Niagara in that year did not find the roads so bad as to divert him from the landscape. Fie saw a transformation from the wreck of war— “every house and barn rebuilt, the pastures crowded with cattle and sheep and the lap of Ceres full. Most of the land on each side of the Mohawk river is a rich flat highly cultivated with every species of grain, the land on each side the flats rising in agreeable slopes.” The river completed the picture and gave the traveler the “most pleasing sensations imaginable” (O’Callaghan, ’49, p. 1105). NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 114 First Improved Roads The Mohawk Turnpike Company was formed in 1800 to improve the travel which was created by the opening of western New York and the regions beyond. The Lancaster turnpike, leading out of Philadelphia, had been completed in 1794, and an area of road build- j ing opened in which the Federal Government, the states and private capital cooperated. DeWitt Clinton, as late as 1810, pronounced the condition of the Mohawk turnpike “inexcusably bad,” in view of the plentiful supplies of stone and gravel which were near the road. But there was improvement and United States mail lines covered the 300 miles between Albany and Buffalo in 72 hours and canvas-covered freight wagons passed through Amsterdam and Fonda, each drawn by four to eight horses and corresponding, in that time, to the freight trains of the New York Central Railway today. From 10 to 14 miles south of the Mohawk, through the valleys and over the high ground of the south end of our area, ran the Great Western turnpike, later known and still known as the Cherry valley turnpike. Charters for various sections of this road date from 1799 and succeeding years, the date given belonging to that 1 part of the road with which we are concerned. The road crosses the Amsterdam and Fonda quadrangles by way of Norman kill valley, Duanesburg, Esperance, Sloansville and Carlisle. It is very direct, crossing hill and valley, after the fashion of early roads whose engineers sought to avoid the widespreading swamps of the forested lowlands. This road was thronged with the private vehicles, coaches and freight wagons which were characteristic of the period, and by droves of swine and herds of cattle driven to market. After 1825 the Erie canal diverted some traffic from the turnpike and in the decades that followed, the railways took all the through traffic and the turnpike became for 40 years or more a country road, silent and in parts almost deserted. Its revival as a trunk line for automo- bile traffic will be noticed later. Our region had its share in the development of the plank road, which met the conservative prejudice against railroads and raised vehicles effectively out of the mud. Thick planks were laid on sills, and the earth wings were graded and drained. In the 20 years following 1835 there were built in the State of New York 2000 miles of plank road. One of these roads, built by different companies, offered con- tinuous traffic in 1849 and thereafter from Fultonville and Fonda GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 1 1 5 on the Mohawk, to Johnstown and Gloversville. The trail, the mud road, the improved earth road and the plank road were leading to the transportation of today. In 1849 also a plank road was completed from Amsterdam to Broadalbin and from Broadalbin to Fish House on the Sacandaga river. Fords, Ferries and Bridges The Mohawk and Sacandaga rivers and Schoharie creek are all subject to Hood currents of great volume. The Sacandaga is fed by the Adirondacks, the Schoharie by the Catskills and the Mohawk by both highlands, with additional water from the plateaus of central New York. The only fording place mapped as such on the topographic map within our area is on the Schoharie creek. It is barely two miles up the stream from the bridge leading across the creek from Fort Hunter. Likewise but one ferry is in operation in our field of study, and this at Hoffman has been long in operation, having been established in 1790. Here on each side of the river were a tributary stream, a small hamlet and at length a railway station, requiring passage of the river — a traffic that would pay, but would not pay for a bridge. Here for almost 140 years successive owners have maintained a small barge and when flood and ice did not forbid, have carried man, beast and machine. Five bridges cross the Mohawk river in our area. The most westerly joins Fonda and Fultonville and the first bridge at this point was built in 1811. Here was an important connection with the growing leather and glove interests of Fulton county, especially after the opening of the Erie canal in 1825. Lumber was brought here from the northern forests, and here hides and leather were sent to Johnstown and Gloversville, to be returned as a finished product and distributed east and west. The next bridge joins Fort Hunter and Tribes Hill, the only suspension bridge, so far as the writer knows, along the course of the Mohawk. Crossing at Amsterdam was for many years by ferry, the first bridge being built in 1821, in time for the traffic of the Erie canal which began to center at Port Jackson four years later. The remaining road bridge belongs with a dam of the Barge canal at Rotterdam Junction, and yet lower down the Fitchburg Railway crosses the Mohawk to its junction with the West Shore Railway. Schoharie creek has had many bridges. A “substantial” bridge is said to have been built over Schoharie creek at Fort Hunter as n6 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM early as 1796. At one time there was a bridge, no longer in existence, at Mill Point. There are two bridges between Mill Point and Burtonsville and there is one at Burtonsville, whose earliest pre- decessor was carried across Schoharie creek in 1790. Four of the old covered bridges in our field, built of timber, have survived until the present time. One of these, crossing the Scho- harie at Esperance, is giving way to a modern bridge adequate to the revived Cherry valley turnpike. The others stand across the Sacandaga river at Osborn Bridge (fig. 68), at Northampton (the ancient Fish House), and joining Edinburg and Batchellerville. All these must soon be removed, when the river is lost in the new Sacandaga reservoir. Apparently the ferry will become an essential means of transport in that region. Transportation by Water The Mohawk river was a highway from Indian days. In early federal times it was vastly important, but its use has declined to a minimum, while land transportation has steadily grown and was never so great as now. The birch bark and dugout canoes were the first craft, propelled by oars and pulled over the rifts. In our section two of these ob- structed bits of navigation were found, the Fort Hunter rift and the Caughnawaga rift. The white man had greater needs and moved his household goods or the produce of the soil in batteaux, larger boats, paddled, poled or towed and carrying much heavier cargoes than the primitive craft. Then came in the Durham boat, much larger, 40 to 50 feet long, and carrying many tons. The use of larger boats was made possible by the work of the Inland Lock and Navigation Company in the last decade of the eigh- teenth century. Wing dams were built at the rifts to concentrate the river’s flow, and the canals at Little Falls and the Oneida Carrying Place were constructed. Sails were used when possible and 18 to 25 miles a day were attained. Schenectady was a center for the making, equipment, departure and arrival of these boats and not only furniture and farm products but furs in quantity and passengers were carried. The year 1812 saw the passage of approximately 300 boats on their way to the Oneida Carrying Place (now Rome). The only competitor of the river route in these years was the turn- pike, which, as we have seen, was gradually improved and could make transit more speedy along the Mohawk valley flood plains and over the Cherry valley turnpike. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 117 In 1825 the water resumed its supremacy, not now by river, but by the Erie canal on its south bank. It is no part of our plan even to sketch the history of this great waterway, but rather to place it seri- ally in its relation to the earlier and later carriage by land and water. On its waters cargoes large for the time could be carried during the open season, and packet boats offered safe and comfort- able journeys to Utica, Syracuse and Buffalo. Both the speed and the conveniences are to be judged not by present standards but by those of one hundred years ago. During the first season of the open canal in 1825, 42 tow boats of various types passed through Utica by average reckoning for each day. We give this available figure that the reader may picture the traffic which must have passed Fultonsville, Fort Hunter, Port Jack- son and Pattersonville during every day of that summer. The canal was absorbing traffic from the roads, and the opening of the railway from Schenectady to Utica was then 11 years in the future. The canal was the outlet and inlet for western New York and the devel- oping central states. The writer remembers the mountains of apple barrels on Genesee canal docks in October, many years after the railways carried heavy traffic. Many of these apples must have gone through the eastern stretches of the canal on their way to the sea- board. Gradually in the later decades of the last century the Erie canal became a lonely and almost abandoned waterway. The construction and the problems of the Barge canal also are for- eign to our present purpose. It is the latest stage of waterway de- velopment in the Mohawk valley and its future is unknown. Its locks and dams are seen at four points in our area — Rotterdam Junc- tion (fig. 69), Cranesville, at Guy Park in Amsterdam and at Fort Hunter. The Sacandaga river until recent years was an important avenue for the transport of logs. They were caught in a boom at North- ampton and sent down the lower river in time of flood. It is not expected that log driving will ever be renewed on the river. At one time boats of light draft plied the river from Northampton to Conk- lingville and in the time of the Revolution the people of Edinburg put a heavy chain across the river to prevent a possible ascent of its waters by a hostile force. The Railways In 1836 it was recorded as a marvelous experience that one could take breakfast in Schenectady, dine in Utica and have tea in Albany, traveling nearly 200 miles in a single day. This was made possible 1 18 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM on August the first of that year, by the opening to public use of the Utica and Schenectady Railroad, for which a charter had been granted in 1833. It was an extension across our area of the railway facilities that were afforded between Albany and Sche- nectady. It does not appear that in 1836 the railway was expected to dis- place the Erie canal, for no provision was at first made for carrying freight by rail. When navigation stopped in the first autumn, a German at Palatine Bridge was permitted to convey his household goods to Schenectady on a car, and thus began the evolution of a public carrier which in fifty years practically left the canal without business. Batchellerville. Shows attempt to cut off meander, to facilitate log driving. Soon after 1880 the West Shore Railway was built as a rival to the Central Lines. After a severe race in rate cutting the newer road was absorbed by the older, and the way opened for a single manage- ment of the six tracks that now border the Mohawk river. The Utica and Schenectady road had become a part of the consolidated line across the State in 1853. The Boston and Maine Railway (Fitchburg) extends about three miles into our region, crossing the Mohawk river at Rotterdam Junction and connecting with the West Shore Railway. The Delaware and Hudson Railway loops over the southern border of the Amsterdam quadrangle for a little over two miles near the GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 1 19 village of Duanesburg, and there is joined by the Schenectady division of the same railway. The junction is two miles west of Duanesburg and the line follows the natural route through Norman kill valley, leaving our area at South Schenectady. Railway communication north of the Mohawk river was long delayed. The Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville Railroad Com- pany dates in organization from 1867 and the line was opened in 1870. In 1872 a company was organized to build a road from Gloversville to Northville, and service began in 1875. A branch line was constructed to connect with Broadalbin. We have now noted all the steam railways in our area. Electric lines now serve the lower Mohawk valley and the Fulton county cities. From Schenectady the north bank of the Mohawk is followed through Floffman and Amsterdam to Tribes Hill. Thence the line bears northward to the glove cities, and runs from Johnstown to Fonda. There has long been local and suburban street railway service in Amsterdam, Johnstown and Gloversville. An electric railway reached Mountain lake from Gloversville but has been abandoned, doubtlessly one of the changes due to the motor car and the improved road. The Modern Roads The new mode of transport is by motor car, and the concomitant of the motor is surfaced roads. In earlier days the canal replaced in large measure the turnpike and was in turn left aside by the railway. No such substitution is now in progress. The motor car takes some traffic from the railway but adds much to it because it widens the reach of the railway line. This is true in our area, where a considerable number of villages and thousands of rural homes are many miles from a railway. Most of these villages and homes are now on or near good roads, and use them by means of mechanical energy. In the future we shall see man’s movements in a manifold and harmonious adjustment in the various forms of land, water and aerial carriage. The surfaced road offers three trunk routes across our area between east and west. The first to be named is the Mohawk turn- pike on the north bank of the river with its subsidiary line, less advanced in modern construction, on the south side of the Mohawk. The second route is by the Cherry valley turnpike, the Great Western road of a hundred years ago, recently improved throughout and opened to modern traffic. It is the shortest roadway between Albanv and Syracuse and has no centers of population except hamlets and villages of modest size. Considering its altitudes in our district and westward, its grades are moderate and it is suited to through travel. 120 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM The third trunk highway is north of the Mohawk river. Like the Cherry valley and Mohawk roads it had an early beginning. Early in the last century the Legislature authorized a road leading west- ward from Johnstown toward the Black river country along the southern border of the Adirondack's. It was much used by immi- grants in the settlement of northern New York. From Johnstown Courtesy General Drafting Co. Figure 12 Map showing modern highways. going west it passes through Cork, Caroga, Lassellsville, Dolgeville and Salisbury to Middleville and thence to the northwest. Eastward it completes the crossing of our area, through Broadalbin and Mosherville and passes on to Saratoga Springs, a finished roadway following the trail over which friendly red men bore Sir William Johnson to the mineral waters of Saratoga. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 121 Good roads now lead across the hills between the Mohawk and the Cherry valley turnpike. One may go from Fultonville by way of Glen and Charleston to Sloansville, or from Amsterdam by Mina- ville to Duanesburg, or through Mariaville to Schenectady. The old trail and early road from Sprakers to the Schoharie may be followed on a hard road as far as Rural Grove. To the north we find the road from Fonda, by Johnstown, Glovers- ville and Mayfield to Northville and the upper Sacandaga. We may also go from Amsterdam by Perth and Broadalbin to Northampton, along the course of the mid-century plank road. Reaching up from Schenectady is a superb road to West Charlton, soon to be carried through Galway to an intersection with the Johnstown and Saratoga highway. Flard roads run from Gloversville northwestward to the nearer Adirondack places of resort. Our map (fig. 12) shows the present state of these roads. So swift is the unfolding of modern transportation that the map of today will show the incomplete road- net of tomorrow. Everywhere the keen sense of the red man or the convenience of the pioneer reveals itself in the roadways of our own time. The Rise of Industries To give a history and description of the leading sorts of manu- facture would require extended treatment. We only can ask what causal relations, if any, the resources of the region have sustained to its industries. The center of the most varied production is the city of Amster- dam. The Chuctenunda creek is a strong and unfailing stream, having nearly 600 feet of fall between the reservoir in Galway and the Mohawk river. Of this fall 350 feet are concentrated in the three miles from Hagaman to the river level at Amsterdam. Through the city it is more like a water slide than an ordinary rapid. Mills are thickly set upon it (fig. 72). This stream was an early incentive to manufacture. In 1802 there were five mills on the stream; in 1813 there were 17, including five grain and four sawmills, four carding and fulling machines, two oil mills, a triphammer, and an iron foundry. Large special enterprises began to develop after 1840. Of these we name four classes of manufacture, although there are many others. There are several knitting mills. If we seek explanation from environment, the water power is sufficient for beginnings but not for continuance on a large scale. It may be added that in the Mohawk valley, Cohoes, Little Falls, Utica and Amsterdam form a zone of knit goods production. Carpets are an immense industry 122 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM in Amsterdam. Their making began in a small way in Hagaman and shifted to Amsterdam through the acquaintance of the first maker with a Scotch dyer whose father made ingrain carpets in his native land. Aside from the small water power the initiative and the development have been purely human. The ancestor of the present proprietor of the linseed oil works began his business in West Galway. Later he found water power in Amsterdam, and, like all the other industries, favorable trans- portation of raw materials and finished product. Brooms are an- other element of Amsterdam industry. The flood plain of the Mohawk west of Schenectady once bore much broom corn. None is there today, but the industry has persisted. Here we have the controlling principle. Human initiative, devel- oped capital, technical skill, a supply of trained labor, reputation of the product, experience in marketing — all these make an industry persist from an early start and may develop it far beyond the capacity of the physical environment to supply either raw materials or power. That natural factors were not neglected is shown by the construction in Galway in i860 of a reservoir to conserve and control the flow of Chuctenunda waters. This was enlarged in 1876 and now adds beauty to the hills and power to the city. Gloversville and Johnstown, the double glove centers, are very different from Amsterdam. The glove-making of Fulton county depended not at all upon power and very little upon local raw materials. Almost from the beginning it searched America and all the world for its hides and skins. There are no other enterprises of comparable magnitude in the glove center. Amsterdam has recently acquired in addition to its dominant old stock, a large percentage of foreign people. Gloversville on the other hand has only 14 per cent of foreign born. The manufactures of the leading Amsterdam products are con- centrated in a few large mills, run by machinery. Glove establish- ments are numerous and many of them small. This is possible, for most of the work is hand craft. This is also illustrated in the diffusion of the industry through Fulton county, with factories in Mayfield and Northville and with sewing machines and industrious women in hundreds of homes on farms and in villages, making up the gloves that have been cut in the factories of the twin cities. We have no space for dates or names in the origin of the glove industry. The initiative was wholly human. Available deer skins and hemlock bark may have had some slight effect, but were not essential either in the origin or growth of the business. All the GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 123 world is tributary in raw materials and the markets are wide. For long the business was ten miles from a railway. It could be so because freights were relatively small as well as the power require- ments. There is no geographic reason why the glove industry should have grown large or should now continue at the foot of the Adiron- dack slopes, unless it be that clear air and good drainage, lake and forest make life there desirable. But there has been every human reason why the business should begin, grow and stay. Our con- clusion is that the geographer can find enough interesting relations between nature and man, without making exaggerated claims in the field of geographic influence. Power Development and Transmission A notable example of changes by man in our field is found in the Sacandaga reservoir, a project of the State of New York which is far advanced in surveys and in financing. The new body of water is one of several to be created on Adirondack streams for the development of power, the preservation of regular flow for industries and hydroelectric plants and the prevention of destructive floods. We find special interest in the new development because in creat- ing the reservoir the hand of man will approximately restore the body of water which we have described as the glacial Lake Sacan- daga. The reader will remember that this lake developed as the Sacandaga glacier front receded northward. It was held in place by ice blockading the Sacandaga valley from Edinburg and Batchel- lerville and northward, and it had its outlet past Vail Mills and over the col at the head of Skinner creek (fig. 28). By the removal of the ice dam, the lake was drained along the new course of the Sacandaga river over the preglacial col at Conklingville, leaving exposed the Sacandaga delta (figs. 39 and 40), also the marshes known as the Vly in the towns of Broadalbin, Northampton and Mayfield. The new work is carried on by the State through the Board of Hudson River Regulating District, having its office in Albany. The reader will best understand the description now to be given, by referring to the map (fig. 15) on which are outlined the shores of the new reservoir. The boundary line has been somewhat generalized from the larger map published by the regulating board. Our map shows the lake to the boundary of our area but does not exhibit its lower extension in Stony Creek and Luzerne quadrangles to the village of Conklingville where the dam is to be built. 124 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM I he reservoir will have a capacity of 283,000,000,000 gallons. The surface of the water may be held at altitudes of 740, 756 or 771 feet, with the consequent water area varying from 16,300 acres to 26,700 acres. The area of the lands to be acquired is about 29,000 acres. The top of the dam is to be 795 feet above mean sea level. The approximate length of the reservoir is 27 miles, and its greatest width, at Northampton, is somewhat over five miles. The shore line will be 125 miles long. The dam at Conklingville will be 1200 feet long, 115 feet in maximum height, 600 feet thick at the base and 40 feet at the top. Much of the lake will be shallow, the deepest waters being along the present course of the Sacandaga river. At Sacandaga Park the depth is 32 feet, the depth gradually increasing to 50 feet at Fish House or Northampton. From that point to Conklingville 50 feet is an average of the deeper parts. The new lake will com- pare in size with Lake George and will have more capacity than the Ashokan and Gilboa reservoirs combined. Striking changes must be made in man’s relation to the submerged area. A very small part of Northville will be occupied, and parts or all of a dozen small villages. Those that will be entirely wiped out are Osborn Bridge in our area, and Day and West Day, north of our boundary, toward Conklingville. Villages to be partially destroyed in our area are Batchellerville, Edinburg, Northampton, Benedict, Munsonville, Mayfield and Sacandaga Park. Only a very small part of Mayfield will be affected. Including the farm population about 1100 people must abandon the area. Other changes include the removal of 22 cemeteries and nearly 4000 reinterments, and the inundation of 68 miles of existing high- ways. New roads to be built include 20 miles of gravel roads, 20 miles of earth roads, and 5^2 miles of paved roads. About 7 miles of the Fonda, Johnstown and Gloversville Railway between May- field and Cranberry Creek must be relocated, and more than one- half mile between Sacandaga Park and Northville. Ten highway bridges will be built, and three interesting relics of a past time will disappear in the destruction of the covered bridges at Osborn Bridge, Northampton and Batchellerville. Looking again at the map outlining the lake, we observe that most of the old Sacandaga lake delta will be submerged. A small island (low till hills on the glacial map) will appear west of Osborn Bridge. A drumloid hill east of Munsonville will also stand out above the waters. Several narrow bays will be found southeastward from Mayfield, conforming in trend to the drumloid topography and GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 125 the direction of movement of the Sacandaga glacier in that region. The head of the lake north of Vail Mills is about two miles from the col where the glacial lake had its outlet. A small increase in the height of the dam at Conklingville would send the Sacandaga waters down the Cayudutta creek to enter the Mohawk river at Fonda. The difficulty of crossing the lake, with its 27 miles of length, is re- duced in importance by the fact that forested mountain slopes largely flank the lake on the east and west, and the population of the separated region is therefore small. Apparently the residents of the great upland spur between the two limbs of the Sacandaga river must reach the open and populous region to the south by ferry or by a detour to the village of North ville. It is expected that the cost of the project will approach $10,000,000 and that the work will be completed by 1930. We have referred to limited power developments along Chucte- nunda creek and other small streams. It remains to observe that our region has a large share in the network of transmission lines and multifold service of the Mohawk Hudson Power Corporation Sys- tem. In the map (fig. 13) we include the greater part of eastern and eastern central New York, from Rome to the New England bor- der. Thus can be seen the relation of transmission lines to our region, which, from west to east, lies between Ephratah and Schen- ectady. The trunk line is not on, but is roughly parallel to, the Mohawk river. Focal points for hydro-electric power are at Trenton Falls on the West Canada creek, Inghams and Dolgeville on the East Can- ada creek, and Spier Falls, Mechanicville and Cohoes on the Hud- son river. The Sacandaga development is yet to come. AH the larger centers of our four quadrangles are served by this system. One of the chief steam electric plants is near Amsterdam. Outside connections lead to Niagara, Black river and New England sources of power. Recent Changes in Rural Life Remoteness as we now reckon it was not disturbing to the pioneer. There were in our region no cities and no large villages. Each ham- let and every farm was almost self-sufficient, and long journeys, save for the emigrant, were few. The Cherry valley turnpike for a gen- eration was a scene of activity. Then for decades it became a coun- try road. The writer saw one section of that road in 1907. Poor soil, poor crops, little farm machinery and neglected houses filled the view. In three hours, seeing short grass, a few oats, two hop fields and not much else, he drove 12 miles on the ancient turnpike, met 126 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM one team and was overtaken by no one. On a recent visit he looked out from a great hill, upon the road, which was full of speeding motor cars. A hamlet, which shall be nameless, seemed in 1907 to have been built and forgotten. With the present paved road and noise of traf- fic, one could not, undisturbed, stop to ponder upon its weathered structures. Mariaville was not remote, but it was silent. Now and for a few years its houses have increased by scores and its waters are frequented by a throng of summer visitors. Cork and Mosher- ville in 1907 seemed quite out of the living world. Today they are on a trunk road from east to west. Except in the Adirondack region there is no point in our four quadrangles which is not easily accessible to a good road. Burtonsville was settled at the close of the Revolution. For many years it was a place of activity, with woolen mill, nail factory, tannery, lumber mills and various lesser shops. An old resident told the writer that he had seen 15 teams waiting there to unload buckwheat, drawn from the high surfaces of thin, bleached soil which still bear that crop. The same informant said that he had seen pork drawn from a farm within four miles of Amsterdam, sold in Burtonsville and drawn back past the home of the seller to be sold in Amsterdam. Now there are 15 families in Burtonsville, with a wagon shop, blacksmith shop, garage and two stores. But there are a good road, telephones and nine radio sets. The little group has rejoined the world. Then came railroads, concentration of populations, mass pro- duction in industries and the decline and isolation of rural life. Now long-distance transportation, a network of local good roads, the rural free delivery, the telephone, the radio and the motor car have brought the world to the rural citizen’s door. Nowhere save in great cities have the inventions and tastes of man made more changes in landscape and life than a period of 150 years has seen in the lower Mohawk valley. Eras of Physical and Human Unfolding The geographer and glacial geologist deal with today and yester- day. Beyond these brief durations the history of our region is in the rocks. We know man here for three or four hundred years. Back of the Mohawk and the pioneer some thousands, possibly many thousands of years of forest and unknown savage intervene since the final melting of the ice. Coleman (’26, p. 71) thinks 25,000, possibly 35,000, years may have passed since the retreat GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 127 began. The time since our region was ice-free would then be much less than either figure. The same authority places the total duration of the ice age at 600,000 to 700,000 years. It is reasonable to think that the glacial winter in the Mohawk region lasted a thousand times as long as the period in which we have an actual record of man in the valley. Any geologist may be expected to believe that the rocks and their fossils record a prior duration from one hundred to one thousand times as long as that of the ice age. Beyond this is time which the rocks do not record. The rocks of the Adirondacks were accumulated in marine waters, although now changed almost beyond recognition as sedi- ments. There were vast intrusions of molten rock, there was cooling, crushing and mountain building. There were in our region or on the north of it heights of unknown form and altitude. In all the millions of years that witnessed the deposition of the limestones, shales and sandstones that underlie most of the surface of our quadrangles, salt waters were there to receive the waste swept in from bordering lands, and in these waters lived the forms that abound as fossils in these rocks. Since the uplift and mountain building which closed the Paleozoic Era, our region has for many million years been land. To that period of disturbance probably belong the uplifts of the Noses, Hoffman and Little Falls. We know with certainty that many and fierce earthquakes must have shaken eastern New York, and that then no Mohawk, or Hudson, or other of the great valleys of New York existed. There was prolonged and vast downwear of the region in Mesozoic time, followed by uplift and making of these great valleys in Tertiary time. The all-covering ice as it gathered gradually by local storms and was dominated by a push from the north, found a Champlain, a Hudson and a Mohawk valley to invade. The Mohawk was a short stream heading at Little Falls. The Sacandaga flowed southward to the Mohawk. A residual soil had long formed the surface, made by decay of rocks in place. For millions of years forests had covered hill and vale and been the home of animal life. All life was destroyed or pushed southward for a period of some hundreds of thousands of years. Then came release. The old or modified biological groups crept back, not as individuals but as kinds. Then forest and stream, hill and valley, mountain and plain made the landscape. This landscape, older than Egyptian or Babylonian records, had not much changed when the Iroquois or the Dutchman first looked out upon it. We imagine with sortie 128 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM essential truth how our region looked before the ice age and when the ice age was here. We can interpret rather clearly the forms and marks and materials left behind in its retreat. We can read letter by letter and line by line the story of man and the changes he has here made. We have rocks, seas, mountains, plains, uplifts, valleys, ice, in descending ratios of time. Man enters the field almost at the end, and does his work here, with ascending measures of interest. A virtual infinitude of time gives dignity to the brief span of man. GLACIAL GEOLOGY OF THE LOWER MOHAWK 129 BIBLIOGRAPHY Antevs, Ernst 1922 The Recession of the Last Ice Sheet in New England. Amer. Geog. Soc. Research Series, 11, i2op. 1928 The Last Glaciation. Amer. Geog. Soc. Research Series, 17, 292P. Beauchamp, W. M. 1900 Aboriginal Occupation of New York. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 32: 1-190 Brigham, A. P. 1898 Topography and Glacial Deposits of the Mohawk Valley. Geol. Soc. Amer. Bui. 9:183-210 1900 The Eastern Gateway of the United States. Geog. Jour. (London) May 1899. Reprinted in Jour, of School Geog., 4:127-37 1908 N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 121 :2i-3i 1911 N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 149:18 1914 Early Interpretations of the Physiography of New York. Amer. Geog. Soc., Bui. 46:25-35 Chamberlin, T. C. 1883 Terminal Moraine of the Second Glacial Epoch. Third Ann. Rep’t U. S. Geol. Surv., p. 291-402 Coleman, A. P. 1926 Ice Ages, Recent and Ancient, p. 296 Cook, J. H. 1924 The Disappearance of the Last Glacial Ice Sheet from Eastern New York. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 251:158-76 Cushing, H. P. 1905 Geology of the Vicinity of Little Falls, Herkimer Co. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 77:1-98 Dana, J. D. 1863 On the Existence of a Mohawk Valley Glacier in the Glacial Epoch. Amer. Jour. Sci. and Arts, 2d ser., 35 ^43-49 Diefendorf, M. R. 1910 The Historic Mohawk. 351 p. G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Fairchild, H. L. 1912 The Glacial Waters in the Black and Mohawk Valleys. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 160:1-48 1918 Pleistocene Marine Submergence of the Hudson, Champlain and St Lawrence Valleys. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 209-10:1-75 Frey, S. L. 1898 The Mohawks, an Enquiry into their Origin, Migrations, and Influ- ence upon the White Settlers. Oneida Hist. Soc. Trans. No. 8:1-48 1905 Tryon County Minute Book of the Committee of Safety. New York. iSi P- Goldthwait, J. W. 1925 The Geology of New Hampshire. Pub. New Hampshire Acad. Sci. Handbook, No. 1, 86 p. 5 130 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Greene, Nelson 1924 The Old Mohawk Turnpike Book, 291 p. Johnson, D. W. 1917 Date of Local Glaciation in the White, Adirondack and Catskill Mountains. Geol. Soc. Amer., Bui. 28 :543-552 Kemp, J. F. 1920 Geology of the Mount Marcy Quadrangle, N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 229-30 : 1-86 — & Ailing, H. L. 1925 Geology of the Ausable Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 261:1-126 Lee, O. jr, & Lounsbury, C. 1909 Soil Survey of Montgomery County, New York. Bureau of Soils, Washington, p. 159-196 Leverett, F. & Taylor F. B. 1915 The Pleistocene of Indiana and the History of the Great Lakes. U. S. Geol. Surv. Mon. 53, p. 1-529 Miller, W. J. 1909 Ice Movement and Erosion Along the Southwestern Adirondacks. Amer. Jour. Sci., 27:289-98 1911 Geology of the Broadalbin Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 153:1-65 1911a Preglacial Course of the Upper Hudson River. Geol. Soc. Amer. Bui. j 22:177-86 i 1916 Geology of the Lake Pleasant Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. i 182:1-75 1917 The Adirondack Mountains. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 193:1-97 1921 Geology of the Luzerne Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 245-46: 1-66 O’ Callaghan, E. B. 1819 Documentary History of New York, v. I, Albany, p. 1-786 1849 Documentary History of New York, v. II, p. 1-1211 Olgilvie, I. H. 1905 Geology of the Paradox Lake Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 96:461-508 Reid, W. M. 1901 The Mohawk Valley, Its Legends and Its History. 455 p. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, N. Y. 1906 Old Fort Johnson. 240 p. G. P. Putnam’s Sons, N. Y. Rich, J. L. 1914 Geol. Soc. Amer. Bui. 25:68-70 Stoller, J. H. 1911 Glacial Geology of the Schenectady Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. i54:i-44 1916 Glacial Geology of the Saratoga Quadrangle. N. Y. State Mus. Bui. 183:1-50 Taylor, F. B. 1903 The Correlation and Reconstruction of Recessional Ice Borders in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Jour, of Geol., 11:323-364 Vanuxem, Lardner 1842 Geology of Third District. Nat. Hist, of N. Y., p. 1-306 INDEX Aborigines, see Mohawk Indians Adebahr, io Adirondacks, local glaciers in, 13 Agriculture, 105 Albany, 89 Ailing, H. L., cited, 44, 130 Altitudes, 9, 10 Amsterdam, 96 Amsterdam quadrangle, 10; striae, 18 Antevs, Ernst, cited, 129 Auriesville creek, 10 Austen, Chester W., statement by, 108 Batchellerville, 93 Batchellerville fault, II Battle grounds, 93 Beauchamp, W. M., cited, 88, 129 Bibliography, 129-30 Bridges, 115 Brigham, A. P., cited, 7, 68, 78, 129 Broadalbin, 92, 103 Broadalbin quadrangle, striae, 18 Butler, Walter, 95 Caughnawaga, 94 Cayudutta creek, 12 Chamberlin, T. C., cited, 7, 36, 129 Charlton, 92 Chuctenunda creek, n Coleman, A. P., cited, 43, 129 Cook, J. H., cited, 74, 75, 80, 129 Crabb kill, 12 Crystalline rocks, graving records, 17 Currytown, 95 Cushing, H. P., cited, 26, 73, 129 Dana, J D., cited, 7, 129 Depth of the ice, 41-46 Diefendorf, M. R., cited, 129 Drainage of area, 9 Drift, thickness of, 46-48 Drift boulders, 48 Drift deposits along the Mohawk river, 57-66 Drumlins, 29-32 Drumloid and linear topography, 32-35 East lake, 12 Edinburg, 93 Erratics, 48 Fairchild, H. L., cited, 8, 45, 54, 75, 76, 80, 129 Faults, 11 Featherstone lake, 12 Ferries, 115 Fonda, 99 Fonda quadrangle, 8, 10; striae, 19 Fords, 1 15 Fort Johnson, 5, 91 Fort Orange, 89 Frey, S. L., cited, 113, 129 Fultonville, 99 Galway, 92 Geographic conditions in lower Mo- hawk valley, 85 German Flats, 90 Glacial lake Sacandaga, 51-54 Glacial striae, see Striae Glaciated rock benches, 35 Gloversviile, 101 Gloversville quadrangle, striae, 19 Goldthwait, J. W., cited, 44, 129 Greene, Nelson, cited, 57, 129 Guy Park, 5, 91 Helen Gould lake, 12 Herkimer, 90 Highways, see Roads Hoffman, 90 Hoffman fault, 94 Ice invasion in New York, 12 Icebergs, 66 Indians, see Mohawk Indians Industries, rise of, 121 Interlobate moraine, 24 Iroquois waters, 67-72 132 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM Johnson, D. W., cited, 71, 129 Johnson, Guy, 91, 94 Johnson, Sir John, 91, 94 Johnson, Sir William, 5, 91, 96, 102 Johnson Hall, 92, 102 Johnstown, 92, 95, 101 ; manor house, 5 Kames, 49 Kemp, J. F., cited, 44, 130 Kenneatto creek, 12 Lake filling and accumulations in marshes, 85 Lake Schoharie, 54 Lakes, dearth of, 12 Lassellsville quadrangle, striae, 20, 23 Lee, 0. jr, cited, 130 Leverett, F. B., cited, 43, 130 Lobe, use of term, 15 Lounsbury, C., cited, 130 Mabie house, 90 Manufacture, leading sorts of, 121 Miller, W. J., cited, 11, 45, 56, 76, 130 Mohawk glacial lobe, limits of, 36-40 Mohawk Indians, sites and trails of, 86 . . -wm Mohawk river, 9, 82; drainage north of, 1 1 ; drift deposits, 57-66 Mohawk Turnpike Company, 114 Mohawk valley, problem of glacial re- cession and high level waters in, 72; lower, geographic conditions, 85 Montgomery county, 93 Morainic areas, minor, 49 Moraines, interlobate, 24 Natural resources, 109 Northville, 103 Noses, fault line and uplift of, 10 O’Callaghan, E. B., cited, hi, 113, 130 Ogilvie, I. H., cited, 45, 79, 130 Palatine Germans, 90 Peck lake, 12 Perth, 92 Perth-Broadalbin till plain, 26 Physical and human unfolding, eras of, 126 Physiography of the four quadran- gles, 8 Plotter kill, 10 Postglacial changes, 82 Power development and transmission, 123 Providence, 93 Quadrangle, defined, 8 Railways, 117 Recessional moraine, 15 Reid, W. M., cited, 88, 130 Rich, J. L., cited, 130 Roads, in; first improved, 114; modern, 119 Rock gravings, see Striae Rock hills of drumloid form, 35 Rotterdam Junction, 90 Rural life, recent changes in, 125 Sacandaga glacial lake, 51-54 Sacandaga glacier, 27-29 Sacandaga river, 12, 82 ; diversion of, 55-57 Sammons, Jacob, 94 Sammons, Sampson, 94 Sand plains, 50 Sandsea kill, 10 Sandstones, graving records, 17 Schenectady, founded, 89 Schoharie, 90 Schoharie creek, 10, 82 Schoharie lake, 54 Schoharie wash plain, 60 Scotch street, 92 Sharon Springs, 95 Soils, 105 South Chuctenunda creek, 10 Stark, General, 93 Stoller, J. H., cited, 26, 130 Streams, work of, 82 Striae, 13; explanation of, 16; record of, 17; discussion of, 21-23; beyond the borders of our area, 23 Sumner, Charles, 93 Sumner, John, 93 INDEX 133 Taylor, F. B., cited, 43, Till moraine, 49 Towereune, 94 Tryon county, 93, 95 Van Curler, Arent, 89 Van Eps family, 90 Vanuxen, Lardner, cited, 130 Warren, Sir Peter, 91 Warrensbush, 91, 95 Water, transportation by, 116 Westward movement, proofs of, 40--41 White settlers, early, 89 Yatesville creek, 10 7 , 130 Figure 14 Drumloid and linear topography. Figure 15 The proposed Sacandaga Reservoir. O ^ ^3 § oS bjo C (fl u 3 6 u §< > o . -*-* v >> „ -fi ^ CD 4-J 'c r3 S' EC oj rt u. bt: bfl ° •£ 2 I *5 o "IT *-G ^ ^Ph Oj0 3 a ^ O ■cC.: Z Figure 18 Airplane view over Amsterdam and the Mohawk river. Looking west- ward, with the Noses escarpment appearing dimly on the horizon. Fort Johnson is beyond the bend in the river. Beyond the river bridge is Barge Canal Lock no. 12, Dam no. 8. New York Central Railway on the right; West Shore Rail- way, South shore turnpike and Erie canal on the left. Figure 17 Looking out over Schenectady from the eastern gateway of our region, “ Yantaputchaberg ’’ from the hills above Hoffman Ferry on the north. South wall of lower Mohawk valley. Schenectady in the distance. The rock benches are repeated as three spurs of the great hill range are seen in perspective. Pho- tograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 19 Sand pit by the railway in the south end of Gloversville. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 20 Interlobate moraine two miles east of Gloversville. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 21 Drumlin at Gioversville, northeast of town. Looking south. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 22 Drumlin with farm buildings in the midst of a sandy moraine two miles east of Gioversville on Broadalbin road, looking west. See figure 23 for boulders on east slope of drumlin. Figure 23 Boulders on east slope of drumlin, two miles east of Gloversville. Same drumlin with farm house in figure 22. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 24 Looking north between Gloversville and Mayfield showing south front of mountains and drumlin parallel to mountain border. Figure 25 East from river bridge, Amsterdam. Observe drumloid profile on right. This is conspicuous from the slopes north of the river. Figure 26 Summer cottages on the north shore of Mariaville pond. The pond is made by flooding the valley between east by west drumloids on the north and south. We here see part of the crest line of the northern drumloid. Figure 27 Glacial rock benches on hill south of Glenville, seen from the west. Observe the escarpments and sloping platforms under the forests in the right hand half of the picture. Figure 28 Col west of Skinner creek. Head of Sacandaga lake spillway. Spillway farther west, direction of Johnstown in figures 29 and 30. Figure 29 Sacandaga lake spillway west of col, looking downstream or westward. Col in figure 28. Figure 30 Sacandaga spillway two miles west of col, looking upstream or eastward. Figure 31 Till cliff, Schoharie creek at Mill Point. Figure 32 Boulder clay one-half mile west of Hoffman on north side of electric railway. Section at the present time much obscured by growth of vegetation. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 33 Cut slope and spurs in till looking east from above the Morris residence at Cranesville. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 35 Glacial boulders near the south end of the postglacial Danascara gorge between Fonda and Tribes Hill above the DeGraff Mansion. Looking southeast. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 37 Sands in Kame, Glenville. Figure 38 Edinburg sand plain. East end of southern segment from the east. Road at left ascends to the top. Figure 39 South front of the head of Sacandaga lake delta, Northville. Observe over the third house from the left the peak of the high kames on the east or farther side of the Sacandaga river. Figure 40 Head of Sacandaga lake delta, showing kame moraine on the left or west. Continued toward the river on the east in figure 39. Figure 41 Sacandaga lake delta, looking north from road junction one mile west of Osborn Bridge. Figure 43 Sand pit at Fultonville. West end of Schoharie wash plain looking north. Foreset beds dip eastward. Figure 44 Tribes Hill wash plain looking into the cemetery from the upper crossing. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 45 East on Antlers golf links. Wash plain of 460 feet. Figure 46 East on washed till shoulder between links and river. The over- lying silts of the 460 feet platform have been here removed. Figure 47 MacFarlaine sand pit, Amsterdam. Berg deposit over sands and gravels. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 48 Up river from bridge, Amsterdam. Even horizon is Yankee hill. Valley of South Chuctenunda creek on the left. Figure 49 Laminated clays, Grieme’s brick yard, Port Jackson. Figure 51 Washed boulders in east of Amsterdam between highway and river. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 52 Abandoned channel. Waters Station looking west toward Hoff- man. Washed till ridge and Mohawk highway on left, electric railway on right. Figure 53 Undisturbed Iroquois gravels, north of turnpike between Waters and Rectors stations. Figure 54 Iroquois gravels below Rotterdam seen from the so'uth bank of the Mohawk river. Figure 55 Haverly sand pit, east edge of Amsterdam quadrangle looking north. Remnant of Iroquois gravels. Terrace slopes north to base of hills. Figure 56 Strata in Haverly sand pit, dipping north from Mohawk river and from the abandoned channel between this tprrace and the New York Central Railway. Figure 57 Remnant of wash terrace of Haverly pit (to the right) showing till denuded of the washed drift. Washed drift under the tall trees. 4 Figure 58 Landslip hills east of Fonda, escarpment on right. Mohawk turn- pike and Mohawk river on left, looking west. Figure 59 Lake filling three miles west of Mariaville. Figure 60 Postglacial gorge of Danascara creek between Tribes Hid and Fonda Diverted course of stream which formerly, preglacially, flowed into the Mohawk at Tribes Hill. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. £ <- o j3 x u o< b b ho Figure 62 “ Tequatsera ” near Johnson’s Station, nine-mile bridge below Hoff- man. Glacial boulder above the fall, washed from the till. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 63 Farm buildings between Gloversville and Mayfield from the east. Figure 64 Field of buckwheat south of Glen, September 3, 1927. Figure 65 Oats near Oak Ridge and drumloid profile on horizon, September 3, 1927. - 1; | Figure 66 Laminated clays, Grieme’s brickyard, Port Jackson. Photographed by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 67 Old colonial road near Danascara gorge between Tribes Hill and Fonda. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 69 Rotterdam lock and bridge. Lock 9, dam 5, Barge canal. Looking south. Figure 70 Tow of canal boats in Barge canal. From Fultonville bridge looking west. Part of Fonda on the right, Noses gorge in the distance. Figure 71 New York Central Railway, looking down the river past Patter- sonville. “Yantaputchaberg” in the distance. Photograph by J. Arthur Maney. Figure 72 Up Chuctenunda creek from Grove street bridge, Amsterdam. Rapids on rock floor afford water power. > 1 1 1 m • < >> 1 1 * . r.l’n- V!--M.; 1 f.teoj®] ■ ■ ■ I A I saW MniVTCDJIKllv' Voh KuhTi A/nnuvMt: .Thmin-nljiuS Geology by . P. Brigham GLACIAL GEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS OF THE LOWER MOHAWK VALLEY