The Geology of Ross County

My Paint Valley High School science fair project from 1985

I am an architectural historian. So why am I talking about geology? Well - other than the fact that my interest in the built environment began in an interest in the natural environment, as my later science fair projects testify - the geology of an area helps determine the architecture of an area.

The first people in this land had to live off it: the prehistoric and historic Native Americans, the Frontiersmen, the Settlers.

They had to know the land and know where they could live on it. This was determined by the geology that shaped the land.

This webpage has been adapted from a slide lecture that INTREPID HISTORICAL SERVICES offers to groups in south-central Ohio.

Our Land

Our Ross County is a beautiful place in a state that many think is flat and boring. Ohio's geology may not be as dramatic as other places, but it is just as exciting, though on a smaller - and to me, a more intimate - scale.

My "Glenallan View" which graced the 1987 county phone book cover illustrates one of the many scenic landscapes in Ross County.

Buzzards Roost point is one of the most dramatic places in Ross County's natural landscape.

The rich level cropland in Paint Valley contrasts with the steep forested slopes of the valley walls (and the lumpy meadowed areas between the two...).

Paint Creek ducks out of its valley through a gorge it cut while releasing pent-up lake water during one of the glacier's visits to Ross County.

Natural Resources

Aside from our scenery - which is an economic resource as tourism - our geology also provides us with natural resources that have been used to build, farm, grow, and manufacture our modified and built environment.

As you can see above, Ross County has agricultural fields, pasture, and forests - all of which are located on various landforms created by our geology.

Blocks of Waverly Sandstone were used to build the 1806-1807 Adena Mansion near Chillicothe. Iron compound in the stone weather to warm and pleasant shades of tan, brown, and rust.

The Ross County Courthouse was built in the 1850s and faced with the Greenfield Dolomite, the grey limestone found at the western edge of Ross County.

Thousands of brick walls are in the county, totaling millions of bricks. Many of those bricks were made on site or in the county. The earliest were burned from clay usually found just beneath the topsoil, while later industries dug out pits in clay banks.

The glaciers created many deposits of gravel in Ross County - bedrock they had travelled over and crushed, and then left behind when they melted away. This mineral resource is used as is or mixed into asphalt and spread on our roads.

Ross County's waterways provide recreation, as well as drainage. Here a kayaker flows down Paint Creek through Alum Cliffs gorge.

It is thought that the reason the moundbuilding prehistoric Indians built so many earthworks here in Ross County is that the terrain - created by the geology - formed an intersection of three different plant and animal communities. These plains, upland, and valley forests kept the Indians well fed and allowed then to build a center of their culture here.

Part 2

• The Bedrock Foundation
• A New Land
• The Ancient Rivers

Part 3

• The Ice Age
• Remnants of the Ice Age
• The Xerothermic Interval