them has been considerable, and was last shipped by the canal from Grahamville to the Glamorgan furnace at Lewistown. large quantities of ore were piled along the canal during 1888 for some distance above Grahamville awaiting shipment; but the furnace being out of blast there was no opportunity for getting rid of this surplus nor of personally inspecting the mines, all of which were idle.
Mr. Austin Farrell, at present superintendent of the Ivanhoe Furnace Company of Virginia, was the last superintendent at these mines, and as it was impossible to make any satisfactory personal examination of them Mr. Farrell has kindly submitted the following facts by letter: “The ore occurs in a synclinal basin and was generally spoken of as the North and South veins, the South vein dipping northwards at angles of from 5° to 40°, and the North vein southwards at about 50°. In many places the South vein lay so flat as to prevent its being worked cheaply and it was therefore abandoned. Both the Sand Vein fossil ore bed and the (Danville) ‘Ginger vein’ were worked, the former about 20 inches thick and the latter 9 inches thick separated by 38′ of sand rock (Ore sandstone and shales). The Ginger Vein was so called from its color and had for its hanging wall a hard sand rock. In all there were 7 openings here, in the Sand Vein bed, Nos, 1, 3, 4, 6 and 7, and two, Nos. 2and 5 in the Ginger Vein. Both veins in all cases were reached by cross-cuts through the slate, which were made feasible by the broken topographical conditions of the ground at the mines. One cross-cut, No. 4, was about 900′ long, starting in the lower Clinton shales south of the southern outcrop of both veins and reaching to the north outcrop of the Sand Vein, which it struck just in the basin. This was the only recent opening in the Sand Vein ore bed, as the ore had been worked out from the other drifts which were located at higher levels and nearer the outcrop. From this long 900’ cross-cut, gangways were extended east and west as usual upon the ore bed. The Sand Vein yielded about 40 per cent. of iron, and the Ginger or Danville bed about 45 per cent; and when these beds were last actively worked they yielded monthly to
