importance in another sense; for, while yielding a good soil along the line of strike of its shales and thin limestone strata, its chief value lies in the fact of its being the repository of the series of fossil-ore beds from which large quanties of iron ore have been mined in the past, and upon which the good reputation of the Juniata iron was founded. The erection of much larger furnaces at the present day, the demand for purer raw materials, large outputs and cheap ores to mine, combined with the comparatively low price of iron, have tended to almost paralyze the ore mining industry in this region, although hundreds of abandoned drifts and slopes bear testimony to the large amount of ore that was once mined from these beds.
The Clinton division may be further sub-divided thus:
| Bloomsburg red shales—Lower Salina group No. Vc. | |||
| 1. | Upper olive and greenish, sandy and limy beds | 175′ | ± |
| 2. | Ore sandstone and fossil-ore beds, | 10′–25′ | |
| 3. | Middle olive shales and thin limestone, | 150′ | |
| 4. | Iron sandstone and block-ore, | 10′ | |
| 5. | Lower olive and brown fossil shales and slate, | 600′ | |
| Total thickness of Clinton Va, 950′± | |||
The various members of the group necessarily vary greatly and gradually thicken up towards the west to about 1200′ in all.
In Union county the Clinton rocks are found in the numerous synclinals and anticlinals of the Buffalo mountains, between outcrops of the Medina sandstone and the Bloomsburg red shales, and along both flanks of Jack’s mountain, and its continuation in Shamokin mountain, finally curving over the whole crest of the latter axis before reaching the river at Turtle creek.
In Snyder county these rocks make a triangular-shaped area, narrowing eastward on both flanks of the Shade mountain axis.
The Ore Sandstone.
The Ore sandstone member of this formation, No. 2 of the general section, is perhaps the most readily identified
