, 1886-06-01
THE PHOSPHATE BEDS OF BEAUFORT


The Great Industry of the South Carolina
Coast-The brotherhood Dredge.
The phosphate beds make the great in
dustry Of Beaufort, as OF most of the coast
southwest of Stone ferry; and as all the
negroes average 81 a day in cash earningt
or can do so If they want to work. their
general condition is good A satisfactory
explanation of these phosphate deposits
has not been worked out, and it is some
thing OF a problem, as the geology of
Sdbeh Carolina jumps all the intermediate
ages between archRan and tertiary. In
the piedmont section Of the state the azoic
rocks stand out sharp and abrupt from
the hills and line the channels of the many
bright and swiftly flowing streams of that
region. A little further down the slope
the drift covers these rocks, and they are
still there;and the excavations at Columbia
bring out a horde of blue and fiecked
granite. A little lower, there is, in popu-
lar language, mo bedrock" At Orange
burg they bored LOO feet for artesian
water, and found drift all the way down
clay, sand, and mari.
Still coming down the slope, one reaches
a point where the sand has travelled so far
from its original matrx in the Blue ridge
that it is completely triturated, and the
hills have no consistency. Along this line,
at an average distance OF perhaps sixty
miles from the coast, is a line of and hills
which seem to have been shaped by the
wind and below them is the broad, flat,
generally unhealthful, slow country
where the purple and chocolate-colored
streams flow sluggishly over Shiny bot
toms, between muddy banks shrouded by
the funeral moss, And yet on the sea
ward side of this tract, IN the bottom OF
thn rr.nIrn ,,l j. l.t IN 40
tending a long distance inland, is the phos-
phate rock.
1t was known to be of some VALUE as
early as 1856. but nothing vas done to
develop 1t until the reconstruction legisla-
ture of 1868 chartered n company to work
1t. Since then the companies have paid a
royalty to the state for all they took out of
nayigable waters or from state land, and
last year the state received SIZE, 900 from
that source AS much was taken from
private lands, the yield must nave ex-
ceeded 200 900 tons. The supply is practi-
cally in~exhnustible, as the strata wherever
pierced are over twenty feet thick; and in
many places it is known hat successive
strata is superimposed with dirt between
When first mined the rock is dark gray or
nearly black; after being washed and
ground it is a lighter gray. The COM
~ oth ~ ~ W - PCA tChf oAo
it is expected that the total yield of the
state this year will be worth over 81 $780,
900.
A great impulse has been given the work
lately by the brotherhood dredge-the in
vention of Samuel Brotherhood-which
takes up the rock by thirty-six iron scoop
buckets, running on axles, somewhat in
the style of the endless platform of a horse
power. In the original rock are sharks
teeth and fish bones of many kinds, which,,
/ suppose, with the phosphate of lime,
of where l write are two steam dredges at
work; across the point are extensive
works on the land, and elsewhere in the
place are large establishments. A few
negroes still follow the old system of wad-
ing in the shallow creeks and carrying out
such detached pieces of the rock as they
can handle.-"Parke' in Chicago Times.