HISTORY OF CLAY COUNTY                      285

celled in fertility. Our superior forests are not the least of our
resources. Our walnut lumber has found a market in England and
Continental Europe. Oak beer cask staves are shipped to St. Louis
on the west, and east to Baltimore and intermediate points. Our
hickory wagon axles find sale in Wisconsin. An immense stave
factory, working one hundred men, cuts, seasons and joints its mill-
ions of staves at Saline City. Our ample forests yet offer most
inviting fields for the industry of those engaged in the manufacture
of agricultural implements and machinery and for those making
the various forms of bent woodwork.
    Beneath all this lies our great treasure in the coal and clay beds,
and in the sand rock quarries. In the one hundred shafts, slopes,
and other kinds of coal mines, unnumbered borings and outcrops, we
have demonstrated the extent and value of the coal beds. We now
know that both the lower four foot strata as well as the second three
to three and a half foot strata of block coal underlies far the larger
area of the county. It is demonstrated that these coals for all
economical purposes—for smelting iron in the blast furnace cupola,
for puddling furnaces in the conversion and production of Bessemer
steel, in the cupola of the foundry, and on the forge, are surpassed
by no known fuel. In accessible extent they are equaled by no
coals of their kind on the globe. Add to these several other beds
of bituminous coals of good quality, occurring at spaces of two to
three miles as we go to the southwest, each strata dipping and
receding at the rate of twenty to thirty feet to the mile. These
several coal beds in the aggregate, make a vertical coal deposit for
the county of twenty-eight to thirty feet. The thinnest worked
strata is twenty inches and the thickest eight feet. Of the clays I
will only brie fly say that the superior stoneware pottery, the famed
stone pumps, the terra cotta work, and the fire-bricks made in the
county, amply attest their value. Sand rock quarries afford material
for grindstones equal to the famed Berea stone of Ohio. The sub-
carboniferous sand rock affords inexhaustible quarries suitable for
columns, fronts, facings, bases, sills, lintels, capitals, or copings, cut
or sawed. equaling in texture, and excelling in color, the famed
Waverly rock of Ohio.
    I would say a word to the outside world: Here is Western In-
diana. We have a salubrious climate, at an elevation of some 700
to 800 feet above the Gulf of Mexico: a good fertile soil in the
midst of the great cereal and meat growing district of North Amer-
ica, where wool growing is remunerative; where the sugar. cotton,
hemp and rice districts are of easy access; where we have easy access
to the great iron deposits of Missouri and of Lake Superior that may
be successfully and profitably smelted and reduced here, as has been
demonstrated by our blast furnaces; where fuel, and of consequence,
motor power is so cheap; where cheap lands and cheap homes can so
readily be had; where we have many railway avenues giving every
facility for ingress and egress, and for the concentration of supplies
and the diffusion of manufactures. And now, that we have reached
a plane of fair civilization if not of enlightenment, with schools,
colleges, universities and churches, may we not reach out a broad.
generous hand and invite capital and manufacturers among us with
assurance of the best prospects of success.