Press and daily Dakotaian. (Yankton, Dakota Territory [S.D.]) 1880-1889, 1886-06-04
.Iallg a,,a 5aautsiaa
the PHOSPHATE BEDS OF BEAUFORT
Tho GREAT Industry Of the south carolin.

Tho 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 earnings,
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 Il problem, as the geology OF
South Carolina jumps all the Intermediate
ages between urchaan 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 fecked
granite. A little lower, there is, in popu-
lar language, @no bedrock At Orange
burg they bored 1,100 feet fer artesian
water, n found drift all the way down
clay, sand, and mari.
Still coming down the slope, one reaches
q point where the sane has travelled so far
from its original matrix in the Blue ridge
that it is completely triturated, n the
hills have no consistency. Along this line,
at an average distance of perhaps sixty
miles from the coast, is a line of sand nils
which seem to have been shaped by the
wind and below them is the broad, fiat,
generally unhealthful, slow country
wherc 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
the creeks and inlets, but occasionally ex-
tending a long distance inland, is the phos
plate rock.
1t was known to be of some value as
early as 1856. but nothing was done tt
develop it until the reconstruction legisla
ture of 1868 chartered u company to work
it. Since then the companies kave paid a
royalty to the state for all they took out OF
navigable waters or from state land, and
last year the state received STE, 000 from
that source. AS much was taken from
private lands, the yield must have ex
ceeded 100000 tons. The supply is practi
caliy ineXhaustible, MS the strata wherever
pierced are over twenty feet thick; and il
many places it is known that successive
strata is superimposed with dirt between
When first mined the rock is dark gray o.
nearly black, after being washed AM
ground it is a lighter gray. The com
mercial article sell at 81 to 50 per ton, ant
it is expected that the total yield of thu
state this year will be worth over 81, 800,
600.
A great impulse has been given the worl
lately by the Brotherhood dredge-the in
vention of Samuel Observation-Disclosures
takes up the rock by thirty-six iron scoop
buckets, running on axles, somewhat il
the style Of the endless platform of II horse
power. In the original rock are sharks
teeth and fish bones Of many kinds, which
l suppose, with the phosphate of lime
make it valuable as a fertilizer. In iron
of where / write are two steam dredges a
work; across the point are extensiv
works on the land, and elsewhere in tn
place are large establishments. A fey
negroes soil follow the old system of wac
ing in the shallow creeks and carrying OF
such detached pieces of the rock as the
can handle.4aPa:l,e' in Chicago Times.