Page:History of Barrington, Rhode Island (Bicknell).djvu/19

Rh sands, gravel, pebbles and boulders, and carrying vast loads of this rocky material, dumping it into the sea and thus filling up the shallower sections. The marks of these great glacial carriers are seen on all the permanent rocks on the banks of our streams and are called striae, or wheel-tracks of the great machine we call a glacier. Fine specimens of these striae may be seen on the ledges by the side of Providence River at and south of Silver Spring and north of Riverside. As these lines and furrows run north and south, they tell us plainly that the ice-flow was southward towards the Atlantic.

The particular glacier, which used Barrington as its dumping ground, had its home probably in Worcester County; possibly at the summit of old Wachusett Mountain. The clay pits of Nayatt, the sands of New Meadow Neck, and the gravel banks extending from Long Swamp to Rumstick and thence to Nayatt are from Southern or Central Massachusetts. We owe our subsoil and substrata to the Old Bay State, but we found them here on our own solid, sea-formed, rocky base. The glacial smoothing plane not only cut down our hills and smoothed off their surfaces, but it brought and dumped large and small rocks that were picked up on the way, ground down and smoothed in the movement of the tremendous gravity machine, and the fields, in all parts of the town, bear witness to the work of this carrier plane. The boulders on our farms are the deposit of the ice, as are the sands and clay beneath the soil, and whether of slate, granite, quartz, iron, or whatever other formation, may be in many cases traced to the ledges in Massachusetts on the north. There is not a Barrington boy that has not seen the black, heavy ironstones of the field. There are some in town that will weigh fifty pounds. On Beacon Hill, Providence, where I now live, I have seen these stones that were two feet in diameter. On the island of Rhode Island, they are the size of cannon balls. These stones or boulders all came from Iron Mine Hill, in Cumberland, and though rough when broken from the original ledge, were smoothed