Thirty-three quarrymen and breakers, 13 outside men and 1 superintendent constitute the force here and the capacity of the works is about 80 tons per day.
The washing plant is simple, and yet, perhaps, capable of improvement. The loaded cars, as they come from the mine, were then dumped immediately onto a Chilian mill wheel crusher, although it was proposed to soon equip the works with a Blake stone crusher and a cylindrical screen 6′ long and 3′ wide. In the summer of 1888, however, the stone was all hand screened. There was a double set of screw-washers, each consisting of a battery of 4 washers, 15′ long. The sand, delivered directly from the rollers, was carried through 4 sets of washers, one above the other, before delivery to the drying floor. Each time the sand is washed it seems to become more white. One battery is occasionally used for the “run of mines,” stone from which second-class sand alone is obtained; the other battery only washes such material as is crushed from the screened stone. This constitutes first quality sand and brings about 40% higher price than the second-class sand.
It takes about 12 hours for the sand to dry out naturally, but if requested by consumers the sand is steam dried by being fed into an iron cylinder, 15x2½x2½′ passing about 30 tons in 10 hours.
Beaver Dam run cuts through this Oriskany ridge about 1½ miles west of the Enterprise quarry, where, despite the fact that the elevation of the ridge has decreased with the expiring of the flexures causing it, three well defined anticlinal rolls are exhibited, which serve to keep the sandstone above water level for nearly a mile north and south.
The first rolL just north of the Union Mills dies away after crossing the stream, where it shows north and south dips of only 15°; but the second and third rolls carry the sandstone on their crests in two gentle folds for a mile further west, finally sinking beneath the Marcellus slates, just east of the road leading to Newton Hamilton. At the Union Mills there is a narrow synclinal of these black slates containing in places outcrops of the Marcellus limestone;
