Schuylkill Valley Paper - An Occurrence of Coarse Conglomerate above the Mammoth Anthracite Bed

It is a time-honored saying in the anthracite region that " under the conglomerate there is no coal;" and the adage is generally reckoned a sure guide in coal-exploration. Yet there are many places where conglomerate, even coarse conglomerate, occurs above important coal beds, and, among others, above the great Mammoth bed. One of the most striking of such occurrences is on the Shippen and Wetherill tract, half a dozen miles west of Tamaqua; and it illustrates remarkably the disastrous effect of a too unquestioning blind confidence in the sweeping literal truth of a broad generalization. Here there is a conspicuous crag formed by a twenty-foot bed of egg-conglomerate, dipping 60 degrees southerly, and jutting out boldly at the western end of a hill, where it is cut through by the small stream of Little Creek. The hill runs eastward for half a mile, with occasional exposures of pebbly rock along the western half of the crest. Eastward from the exposures lies the old Kentucky Bank mine, abandoned thirty years ago, where the Mammoth bed was worked down to water-level through a space of a mile and a quarter westward from the Palmer tunnel to the very edge of the