Special Report (Volume 1) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: In 1880 60,781 tons. 1881 109,033 1882 152,940 1883 217,531 1884 244,099 1885 304,509 This coke, as a general thing, is of excellent quality for both iron ore smelting and foundry uses, and with the exception of a very small percentage was made from coals of the Warrior field. About all of this output was consumed in the State. It is worth about $2.75 per ton, which would give a value of $837,399 to the product for the year 1885. The Warrior coal field has besides its coal three or four seams of black band Iron ore, considerable clay iron atone, inexhaustible quarries of the best of building and paving stones, and the greatest quantity of as fine timber as can be found anywhere. The seams of black band ore range in thickness from one foot to four feet, and the ore from two of the seams has been tested, in the furnace, with favorable results when mixed with more siliceous ores. The chnj iron stone occurs as interstratified bands and as layers of nodules, balls and kidney-shape concretions, dispersed through the thick beds of shale. The building stones are easily worked and are of a good variety and durability. The paving stones are of all degrees of thickness and of great uniformity with perfectly smooth and beautifully rippled marked sides. These paving stones, from their great regularity, in certain localities have been called '/dank rocks, and appear, as .seen in the faces of many of the quarries, as if they had been piled up on one another by rule like the rows of bricks in a brick wall. The larger timber consists principally of long and short leaf pine, oak, gum, beech, poplar and cypress. This long leaf pine, in certain parts of the field, forms forests which will yield from 18,000 to 20,000 feet of good merchantable lumber per acre, and the oaks, gum,...