SURROUNDING® TYGARTS CREEK AND THE LITTLE SANDY RIVER
Kentucky is a wilderness. Kentucky is a rain forest. And Kentucky remains a frontier, settled so early on that other pioneers quickly passed through to free greener lands over the river.
Thank God for that gift to me. For I, like you are, am still an explorer, and this land is still new in discovery!
Kentucky’s population is about 4.5 million, living in a wonderland that stretches all the way from the mountains of Boone to the rivers of La Salle and Marquette. Twenty million people live in New York City and 7.5 million in Dallas-Ft. Worth. 9.5 million people live in Chicago and 13 million in Los Angeles. We live in Kentucky and are lightly spread out over our Commonwealth. A Paradise. That is what was meant when the early writers wrote down the word “Kentucke.” You know what the old preacher said, “Paradise is a Kentucke kind of a place!”
If you are up north, along the rivers of Kentucky’s history, you will see what that mighty frontiersman, Simon Kenton, saw. Called Cuttahotha, the “Condemned Man,” by the Shawnees, he was an early hunter in these northeastern regions of Kentucky.
Native Americans had been living in these Kentucky valleys for more than 10,000 years. Valleys teeming with animal, vegetable, and mineral mystery, experienced forever by the Native Americans, and later the American colonists, buried here.
Roll your eyes backward. Look into your imagination and let’s begin. And use this lecture as a template to spread your interests throughout this Commonwealth. Experience its wonder and dive more deeply into its history. Be the modern-day explorer still experiencing the hidden riches of this land called Kentucky!
There are caves here and they are splendid. And there are many more rock openings that you don’t even know of lying beneath the sandstone capstone explored only by the Spotted-Tail Cave Salamander [Eurycea lucifuga]. A brightly colored, black-dotted orange creature, named by Constantine Rafinesque in 1822, who announces the cool grey stone openings leading into darkness.
I refer here to Tygarts Creek and the Little Sandy River, two kingdoms of vegetable and mineral composition, each one different in culture and history. Each a watershed, complete in its own drainage basin. At one time, the people along Tygarts Creek broke off from their neighbors and tried to form their own new county in 1904, named for Kentucky Governor J. C. W. Beckham. It lasted for only 80 days, its legality being called into question immediately. Yet the physical rise of the Big Hill to the east of Tygarts Creek does seems to be a natural dividing line from the folks living “over there” along the Little Sandy River. Beckham was the only county to be decertified in Kentucky history. Both Tygart’s Creek and the Little Sandy River are still included within the boundaries of Carter County today.
That area was settled by eastern colonists originally attracted to the presence of salt licks here. Buffalo trails would have guided them in. But this wilderness had already been completely explored, and fully experienced. These waterways would have already been known as magical lands to those Native Americans living across the river at the mouth of the Scioto River at what is now Portsmouth, Ohio. Native Americans and their ancient organizations were especially interested in Tygarts Creek, which opened up its mouth opposite the great Portsmouth Earthworks constructed by those famous Adena and Hopewell peoples. A great assortment of massive mounds, with two limbs that jumped over the Ohio River into Kentucky.
Take a look at the drawings made of the site by Squier and Davis in the 1800s. The mouth of the Scioto River contained a great ceremonial mound center of the Native American Hopewell Culture that flourished so brightly 2,000 years ago. And it was followed by the egalitarian culture of the Fort Ancient Peoples.
Certainly, the wilderness of Tygarts Creek, opening up across the river in Kentucky, must have been a place to search out the mysteries in life’s meaning. And in its upper reaches, a “Temple of Caves” was found within which to reflect upon the designs of a Creator. We little suspect the true experience of Native American exploration in this region. Generations over hundreds of years, even millennia, following the Pleistocene Mammals in!
So it is surprising that, after 1977, those speeding through Carter County on the newly completed Interstate 64 did not think about stopping in Olive Hill on Tygarts Creek or Grayson on the Little Sandy River. We are too few, we modern-day explorers. We are too busy getting to Lexington or Charleston to tarry in the forest secrets that our automobiles are fleeing.
But this area was no secret to the famed Kentucky State Geologist, Willard Rouse Jillson, who wrote the following in his 1928 treatise entitled, “Geology and Mineral Resources of Kentucky.”
“One of the most important but sightly utilized natural
resources of Carter County is its scenery consisting of
a wealth of wild and slightly inhabited “gorge and hill”
country coupled with many caves and some rather
notable natural bridges of limestone…”
The mineral resources of Carter County have long defined its history in this part of Kentucky. But its future might very well be in its natural balance of beauty. And this region might become of interest to all young Kentuckians recognizing the great opportunities presented by Kentucky’s natural environment. There is water here, and green things too, and natural cave openings surrounded by an iron, clay, and limestone mining history!
Let us look at that busy past in an area that now looks like a forested, sleeping valley that just smiles as you pass speeding by!
We’ve already spoken of the Native American Hopewell Culture that raised the great Earthworks at the mouth of the Scioto River in Portsmouth, Ohio. They were abandoned long before the memory of modern Native Americans could maintain them. But across the river in Kentucky, there was a village in 1751. It was part of “Lower Shawneetown,” near the mouth of Tygarts Creek in Kentucky. It was visited by frontiersman Christoper Gist scouting out land in that year. But that village was gone when the European settlers began pouring in over the mountains and down the river later in the century. But not because “Kentucke” was uninhabited. The Shawnees here were not just visitors.
The lands of our Commonwealth had been well inhabited by Native Americans for more than 10,000 years. In the 1970s, I copied their petroglyphs from a high rock cliff above Tygarts Creek. But European diseases and slaving expeditions had devastated native populations all over eastern North America. And then in the mid 1600s, the Iroquois Nation, armed with Dutch firearms, were able to sweep clear the land, driving the Shawnees out of Ohio and Kentucky, into Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Illinois.
The earliest colonial explorers probably entered the area from the east along the Big Sandy River Valley. Both the “Big” and “Little” Sandy Rivers would have been named for the sand eroded from massive Pennsylvanian Sandstones on top of the deep mountain ridges. Tygarts Creek was named for Michael Tygarts, of whose life little was known or lived. He died early, drowning trying to cross at the mouth of the creek he was exploring.
Tygart apparently traveled in good frontiersman company, for he explored the region with Simon Kenton, a skilled wilderness man of more accomplishment, perhaps, than even the more famous Daniel Boone. Boone also came down the Big Sandy in 1767 with his brother, Squire, but crossed over near Prestonsburg on the Levisa Fork River. He spent a winter at the mouth of Salt Lick Creek there and, being exceptionally strong and interested, wandered throughout the whole region. Maybe he carved his initials on a tree along Tygarts Creek and we just missed it. There is a Boone Ridge Road, a Boone Cemetery, and a Boone Furnace in Carter County.
Grayson County was formed in 1838 and named for an aide de camp of General George Washington, Colonel William Grayson, who obtained 70,000 acres here in Revolutionary War land grants. William was an interesting political figure, one of two Senators who had voted against the ratification of the new Constitution.
But the history of the geography of Carter County goes back much further, more than two million years previous. It was then that Pleistocene Era glaciers spilled forth from the northern climes in multiple waves of bulldozer-like crushing ice sheets. They swept toward the southeast area of Ohio but did not reach the region that would later become the mouth of the Scioto River. But the glaciers did dam up the northwest flowing rivers that carried away the waters of West Virginia, western Virginia, and Northern Kentucky. We call that ancient drainage the Teays River System, and it flowed west across Central Ohio and Indiana, turning south, perhaps, at the Wabash River.
That pre-glacial river was named by geologist William G. Tight, for a West Virginia town that lays in the bottom of an obviously wide river valley that is missing its river. You drive through that riverless valley on Interstate 64 between Huntington and Charleston, West Virginia. Go ahead and stop on in. Take a look at the terrain view on your smartphone’s map app as you get gasoline or charge your battery.
When the glaciers began driving south about 2 million years ago, their mile-high ice face pushed before it all the rock it was scraping off the surface. That rock was deposited in the deep Teays River Valley, flattening out and hiding the northern stretches of its former watercourse. And the glaciers dammed up all the waters that had once flowed to the north from the still unglaciated portion of the Teays channel.
It is more than a coincidence that millions of years later, the great Hopewell Native American culture would spring out from that location, exploiting the newly exposed lands to the north when the glaciers retreated, while continuing to explore the ancient biological niches across the river in the unglaciated Mountains of Kentucky.
Kentucky’s land was not reached by those glacial bulldozers. They did not cover Kentucky’s rock surfaced land that has been exposed and eroding for more than 300 million years. Landforms like those found in the Tygarts Creek and Little Sandy River valleys. And therein lies a mysterious geologic question involving the absence in this area of certain ancient rock layers elsewhere present in Kentucky between the Mississippian limestones below and the Pennsylvanian sandstones above. Fun!
When the Pleistocene glaciers blocked up the Teays River two million years ago, they backed up the waters of the rivers flowing north toward the now filled in channel. And that frustrated drainage rose up into a huge stationary body of water, Lake Tight, named for William Tight, who worked out its history [he was also once President of the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque]. The lake was 900 feet deep and reached 7,000 miles in circumference. Think of Lake Erie. It was about that size. And the lake extended along and beyond both Tygarts Creek and the Little Sandy River. [What is the difference a river and a creek? It is not that 100-mile rule that you might have been thinking!]
What an environment that lake must have created! Huge, high monolithic ice sheets to the barren north and ancient crenulated rock ridges to the south. And within those ancient rock ridges, forest and animal life that had been evolving for 50 million years, ever since the Mild Tertiary Forest first developed and had then flourished here.
Eventually, the lake eroded a path to the southwest, joining other ponded rivers and creating the modern Ohio River. Prior to the Glacial Ages, the Big Sandy, Little Sandy, Tygarts, Licking, and Kentucky Rivers all flowed north through Ohio and Indiana and into the Teays River drainage. Back then, the smaller Ohio River probably started out as a tributary of the southern Cumberland River, perhaps beginning at Beargrass Creek in Louisville!
There is much that can be explored while sitting on that boat of a chair, sailing through in your imagination and into the recent geologic history of this majestic region. But getting out within it will allow you to live in it!
That this area was known to the earliest pioneers, is shown by John Filson’s 1784 map, which accompanied his book entitled, “The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke,” in which he made Daniel Boone so famous. For our purposes, the history of northeastern Kentucky would have been known even better, if he spent more of his time with Simon Kenton!
But Filson’s map is important. It shows “Tigerts Cr. [sic]” but no roads. Filson does show salt licks on the Big Sandy River, but no “Buffalo Roads” leading to it.
Filson, in his text, mentions neither Kenton nor Tygart. But he did have this to say about the area in question.
“All the land below the great Kanawa until we come near the waters
of the Licking River is broken, hilly, and generally poor; except in
some valleys, and on Little and Big Sandy Creeks, where there is
some first rate land, but mostly second and third rate land. It is
said, that near this water is found a pure salt rock.”
On Elihu Barker’s 1795 map of Kentucky, both “Tigers Creek” [sic] and the “Little Sandy River” are shown, but no roads or salt licks are noted in the region. But salt licks nearby drew the first pioneers to develop salt wells in the Little Sandy River Basin.
From the late 1700s through the Civil War period, the salt industry was critical to Kentucky. During the Civil War, the salt works of Saltville in western Virginia were heavily fortified, much fought over, necessary Confederate resources.
Iron was the next industry to develop in the Tygarts Creek area. It was part of the “Hanging Rock Iron Region,” extending down from Southeast Ohio and over the river into Kentucky. Iron deposits were exploited there by 1826. Twenty-five years later, almost 70 iron furnaces had been constructed. Everything needed was found in this region. Iron ore [hematite, siderite and limonite], limestone for flux, and trees to make charcoal for higher furnace heat. In fact, the region’s forests would soon be cleared for iron production. The Civil War iron for the hulls of USS Monitor and CSS Merrimack came from this Hanging Rock Iron Region.
It is estimated that each furnace, each year, consumed four hundred acres of trees! For each ton of iron produced, three tons of iron ore, 300 pounds of limestone, and 190 bushels of charcoal were required. That’s why coal back then, before it became the dominant fuel, was called “stone coal,” to distinguish it from the wood-based “char coal.”
Richer iron ore fields in the Great Lakes region and Alabama, along with the development of the steel blast furnace, doomed Kentucky’s iron industry by the end of the nineteenth century.
Coal deposits were next to be exploited in the region, especially the layers of what is referred to as “Cannel Coal.” This fine-grained coal was not produced in plants from tree tissue and debris falling into swamps. It was formed by windborne plant spores and tree pollen falling onto open water. High in oil content, these coals are explosive and fiery on combustion, too hot to burn in a regular home furnace.
But Cannel Coal was superb as a raw material to produce “illuminating gas.” That gas was used for the production of light and was much in demand for that purpose until more abundant “coal gas” became available from the production of coke as fuel for the new iron furnaces. “Metallurgical grade coal” [high carbon, low impurities] was also available in the area and was essential in the production of steel.
Bituminous thermal coal [used for heat generation and in the electrical industry] is what was primarily mined by coal companies in the region, many of which created “coal towns” to support the workers imported to operate the mines. Coal extraction flourished in Carter County with the building of the railroad from Charleston, West Virginia to Lexington, Kentucky. By the early 20th Century, however, coal mining operations in this area had diminished.
In this region, the bottom layers of the sandstones laid down during the Pennsylvanian Period [called “Coal Measures” in some mining literature] had been broken open and the surface of the older Mississippian Geologic Period limestone and shales had been uplifted and exposed to erosion. This caused a break in the normal geologic sequence of rock strata in the region. We call that condition an “Unconformity.”
When the later Pennsylvanian Period rivers and oceans again began laying down sediment, it filled in this uneven surface with localized lenses of a high-quality “Flint Clay.” Flint Clay is called such because of its fine grain structure which causes it to fracture like glass or flint when broken.
The Tygarts Creek Flint Clay was probably an accumulation of widespread volcanic ash deposits. Those deposits are now found in scattered pockets at the base of those Pennsylvanian strata.
Properly “fired,” these Flint Clays produce some of the finest refractory clay bricks in the nation. They were used for high temperature ceramics in steel furnaces and other high temperature applications. The mining of this fire clay, adjacent to a railway running to distant markets, again made Carter County a mining hub in Kentucky. Beginning in 1883, the Olive Hill district flourished, with major production continuing into the 1950s.
Development of the region’s natural resources was also facilitated by completion, in 1926, of U.S. Highway 60, the “Midland Trail” [Roosevelt Midland Trail]. It was developed by the Federal Government and runs from Washington, D.C. through Grayson, Olive Hill, and Morehead on the way to Los Angeles.
The first railroad through Carter County was the Elizabethtown, Lexington, and Big Sandy Railroad [E, L & B S]. In 1881, the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad [C & O] bought out the E L & B S. The trains, in addition to hauling out coal and clay, brought in many patrons to the healing waters of Aden Springs, an early example of ecotourism in the area.
And isn’t that what we are doing now? Here at Carter Caves State Resort Park? A natural landscape riddled by fascinating cave systems in the same limestone strata that houses Kentucky’s famous Mammoth Cave National Park in Central Kentucky?
There is so much to see here, and not just in the park. Science, History, and Culture are all wrapped up in the naturally drained theme parks of Carter County. Four hundred million years in the making and visited by many wanderers before you got here. People wandering through, long before the Europeans even discovered this continent. Archaic, Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient Peoples. And their Shawnee descendants still lived in the region when Kenton, Tygart, and Boone first explored within it.
Aren’t these lives and landscapes both the past history and the future glory of Kentucky? They could be. Let us begin our journey in Carter County, Kentucky, where there are so many different trails running through the forest!
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