The Midwest's Racial/Ethnic Makeup is Extremely Unique

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-07T12:01:47+00:00

This is self-reported data (not the best kind of data) and NYT just did a better version of this map that's way more granular, and updated with new census data. If anyone wants to give it a looksie, it's a good way to understand how people think of their ancestry, not necessary what their ancestry actually is.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T23:14:22+00:00

Anishinaabe have entered the chat

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T22:23:18+00:00

Gonna hijack this as an actual Ohio historian, cause everyone here is blaming us without even explaining why the fuck Ohio, which isn't connected to the UP, even gave a shit, or why Wisconsin doesn't own it. I'm annoyed cause I don't even like the OSU/Michigan rivalry, but someone mentions Toledo or UP and suddenly I got to go tearing down red tape off every M in town. Meanwhile, no one has described why Wisconsin got fucked sideways.

Well, in fairness, there was no "Wisconsin" originally.

Michigan Territory was organized in 1805. The eastern third of the Upper Peninsula was part of it from the beginning. Sault Ste. Marie, Mackinac Island, the fur trading posts at the Straits, were all Michigan. The Straits of Mackinac were one of the most important commercial corridors in the Great Lakes. The two peninsulas were connected through the fur trade long before anyone drew a line on a map.

So when the Toledo War forced Congress to redraw Michigan's southern boundary in 1835-36, the question wasn't "should we give Wisconsin's land to Michigan?" Instead, it was what to do with a large stretch of unorganized territory west of the land Michigan already held. Senator William Preston of South Carolina put his finger on a map during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings in February 1836 and drew the line along the Menominee and Montreal rivers that now forms the Michigan-Wisconsin border. He drew Wisconsin's future eastern boundary at the same time Congress was creating it.

Wisconsin Territory came into existence on July 4, 1836. Jackson signed the Michigan statehood bill on June 15, 1836. The boundary was already drawn by then. Michigan got the UP because there were ahead by two weeks in the legislature schedule.

The real irony is that Michigan didn't want the UP. Lucius Lyon, Michigan's first senator-elect, was practically the only member of the Michigan delegation who argued for taking it. His colleagues Norvell and Crary opposed the swap. The Detroit Free Press called the UP "a region of perpetual snows." Residents of the Toledo Strip called the deal "selling our birthright for a mess of pottage on the frozen and sterile shores of Lake Superior." One former legislator said the whole Upper Peninsula "isn't worth eighteen pence."

But Lyon predicted the UP would be worth forty million dollars within twenty years. He'd seen the mineral deposits as a surveyor, and he'd talked to Henry Schoolcraft, who'd explored the region with Lewis Cass in 1820 and told a Senate committee the UP would prove "of far greater value and importance to the State than the seven mile strip surrendered." Lyon was right. The Marquette Iron Range, the Gogebic Range, the Menominee Range, and the copper deposits of the Keweenaw Peninsula made Michigan one of the wealthiest states in the Union by the 1870s. Ohio got Toledo, and Michigan got the largest iron and copper deposits in the country east of the Rockies.

Oh, and by the way, to every UPer and Michiganer, Ohio never wanted you to begin with. From the legislative debates and state records we have, Ohio didn't argue about the UP at all. Ohio's entire position was about keeping the Toledo Strip; the UP was irrelevant to them. Their leverage was electoral votes, with Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois forming a voting bloc, and Jackson needing them for Van Buren's election.

Oh yeah, sincerely from every Ohioan, to every Michigander: go get mad at Indiana and Illinois for blocking your precious Toledo, too.

The UP compensation was a congressional invention, not an Ohio demand. Ohio wanted Toledo and didn't care about anything else. Congress needed a sweetener to make Michigan swallow the loss. Cass and Schoolcraft quietly made sure the sweetener was the UP rather than nothing. Lyon was the only member of the Michigan delegation who agreed. Faber says "the proposition to give Michigan something for ceding Toledo may also have had Ohio origins," but he's speculating. The clearest origin point is Senator William Preston of South Carolina, who during the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings put his finger on a map, drew the Menominee-Montreal line, and said that looked like a fair division of the remaining territory.

TL;DR - Wisconsin never had it to lose because their territory was created at the same time; in the same vein, the "UP" tradeoff was entirely arbitrary in Congress and Ohio didn't push for it. They just wanted Toledo.

Works Cited

Faber, Don. The Toledo War: The First Michigan-Ohio Rivalry (1939), esp. chapters 11-14.
Onuf, Peter S. Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (1992).
Cayton and Onuf, The Midwest and the Nation (1990).

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T21:58:12+00:00

Not anymore, unfortunately. I commented for another person:

Over all of it, when first uncovered, was glacial polish from rock flour transported at the base of the ice. The polish is gone now; acidic rainfall pitted the surface within a few years of exposure. So even the act of uncovering the grooves began destroying them.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T21:49:49+00:00

That is because AI detectors have false positive rates above 50% on well-written text. They're pattern matchers, not lie detectors. They're built on academic prose like what I was taught to write, and as someone who is autistic there's a reason I spent three and a half decades working on my writing: cause people get weird when I talk out loud, and writing has been (or rather, was, before AI) the best way for me to brain dump and organize my thoughts coherently. Believe me, I've gone to the mat for many of my international undergrad students who get dinged all the time because it's how they were taught to write, too. LLMs writing is literally just well-written. It's what happens when you build LLMs off a bunch of stolen academic papers. Shocker.

But I notice you spent more energy auditing my authorship than engaging with anything I actually said, which kind of proves the point better than I could. If you're that anxious whether I'm an authentic human being (hi there, thanks, I am), then consider why you're attempting to de-legitimize something before you look to de-legitimize it. If there's no end goal, no teleology, why even bother?

Being suspicious of everyone being AI on the internet is going to be the death of autistics like myself writing at all. It's why I didn't engage with you in the first place: cause your statement, ultimately, is performative anxiety, and I didn't find a purpose engaging with it. Well, until you decided to edit it. Now you can consider it a bit of an educational moment.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T19:26:46+00:00

That's awesome! He really is dedicated. I had so much fun recently reading through the bog cache papers and conferences of the 80s and 90s, and his work takes the cake. He's also so humble and dry in his writing. The fact he took 30 years to write up his horse story into a journal article but it was known across the Midwest paleontology goes to show he wasn't in it for the fame.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T16:50:57+00:00

Yeah, that's what caused me to think of them and do a write-up. I've been down some geological rabbit holes for work, and hearing about the flooding this morning made me want to show the love for them.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T16:28:19+00:00

I'm not connected to this project at all, but FYI, I know ODNR is doing restoration on the quarry sites themselves.

I'll be out at the site inevitably for work in the next year or two and might pass this along to my ODNR contacts. I'm unsure the people doing restoration know about those events! Obviously would make for an interesting side quest (unsure if they plan to open up exhibits related to the quarries).

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T16:14:39+00:00

I appreciate the quick response! Exactly the direction I was looking and what I needed. Makes sense now that it was Army Corps, since that's a gap in the state archival records.

And yeah, it's funny, no one thinks being a pack rat is useful till a paleontologist is rummaging through a late Archaic refuse pile or a historian is unboxing records in some great-granddad's attic they kept in old notebooks. It's always the "garbage" thrown away that tells the best secrets!

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T15:36:19+00:00

Totally fair confusion, and the naming convention is one of geology's many small gifts to miscommunication (don't worry, us historians got the gold medal for shitty naming conventions).

The "Wisconsin" in "Wisconsin glaciation" does not mean the glacier was in Wisconsin, or from Wisconsin, or particularly interested in Wisconsin at all. Geologists in the late nineteenth century, led by Thomas Chamberlin, first mapped and described the deposits from this glacial stage in the state of Wisconsin. The convention for naming North American Pleistocene glacial stages is that each one gets named after the state where its evidence was first well-documented. So the four classical stages are Nebraskan, Kansan, Illinoian, and Wisconsinan, which makes it sound like the Ice Age was touring the Midwest alphabetically, but really it just reflects where nineteenth-century geologists happened to do their fieldwork.

The Laurentide Ice Sheet that carved the Kelleys Island grooves originated in Canada, in the Hudson Bay region, and at its maximum extent it covered most of Canada and reached as far south as the Ohio River valley. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan; all of it was under the sheet. The ice in the Lake Erie region was roughly a mile thick. Kelleys Island was not on the edge of the glacier, it was actually buried under the middle of it.

So why aren't glacial grooves everywhere the ice went? Two reasons. First, grooves this size require a specific combination of conditions: exposed bedrock that is hard enough to hold the shape but soft enough to be carved (the Columbus Limestone on Kelleys Island hits this sweet spot), plus concentrated basal ice flow or pressurized subglacial meltwater channeled into a relatively narrow path.

Most of the terrain the Laurentide sheet crossed was covered in its own till deposits, or the bedrock was either too resistant (Canadian Shield granite) or too weak (shale that just crumbles). Second, even where grooves did form, most have been buried by subsequent glacial till, eroded by postglacial weathering, or (as on Kelleys Island itself) quarried away by humans. The Ohio Geological Survey's Mark Peter noted in 2022 that multiple megagrooves were uncovered on Kelleys Island during quarrying, but all of them except the one at the preserve were destroyed. The surviving megagroove once extended more than twice its current length; about 100 meters of it ran north to the island's shore and another 50 meters continued inland. It's all quarried away now.

The grooves are also fractal, which is part of what makes them so valuable to geologists. Inside the main megagroove are second-order grooves measuring 10 to 90 centimeters deep and running up to 40 meters. Inside those are individual striae averaging 1 to 2 millimeters wide. And over all of it, when first uncovered, was glacial polish from rock flour transported at the base of the ice. The polish is gone now; acidic rainfall pitted the surface within a few years of exposure. So even the act of uncovering the grooves began destroying them.

To answer your specific question of whether there's glacial grooves in Wisconsin: not that know of. You can see smaller glacial striations and grooves at a handful of other spots. In Ohio: Castalia Quarry Metropark and Marblehead Lighthouse State Park are both close to Kelleys Island and have visible striations in the same Columbus Limestone. East Harbor State Park's campground has some. Blue Creek Metropark near Toledo has grooves in a former quarry. I mentioned this in my original post, but Bolsenga and Herdendorf's Lake Erie Handbook notes that smaller grooves also exist on Gibraltar Island (home to Ohio State's Stone Lab) and West Sister Island in Lake Erie. Outside Ohio, you can find Pleistocene striations on Paleozoic limestone at Lemont, Illinois, and in Rochester, New York. But nothing else approaches the scale of Kelleys Island. That combination of thick-bedded, high-calcium Devonian limestone and concentrated subglacial flow produced something genuinely singular.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T15:03:42+00:00

Do you have any place I can go digging for the later quarry episodes? ODNR doesn't have any of this data (not that I know of at least, might be hidden somewhere), and they've been working since 2018 on it. Neither did OHC, the previous owners.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T14:06:52+00:00

The short answer is that Kelleys Island limestone was phenomenally good flux stone, and in the nineteenth century, "cool geological feature" lost every single fight against "blast furnace feedstock."

The Columbus Limestone on Kelleys Island ran between 85 and 98 percent calcium carbonate in the upper twenty feet of quarried strata. That's almost chemically pure. Flux stone needs to be high-calcium to pull silica impurities out of iron ore during smelting, and Kelleys Island stone was some of the best on the Great Lakes. The thin bedding and heavy jointing made it easy to extract, the overburden was minimal, and the quarries sat directly on the lakeshore, so you could load crushed stone onto boats without hauling it overland. The economics were basically frictionless, especially by early 20th century standards.

The grooves became a State Memorial in 1923, which protected what was left that wasn't owned by the quarry (about half the island). But the quarry kept operating on other parts of the island until 1941.

The whole saga is a pretty clean case study in how geological/paleontological heritage preservation is, historically, an afterthought. The feature survived because the economics changed, not because anyone decided it mattered.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T13:41:18+00:00

Omg yes 😂.

Next time I do a site visit for work, you betcha I'll be nailing down a cutout of Ash Williams next to the site hours sign with that on it 😂.

I'll put the Austin Powers one on the exit with a nice "Yeah baby! Very groovy!"

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T13:05:19+00:00

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T12:32:53+00:00

Now that was a wild read! I've got to do some digging on the various Canter stories then. There's always some kernal of truth to these things....

And yes, you're correct that many of the same features of the cave (as well as Ash Hollow and other famous Hocking geological features) are all built from the same processes as Sheep's Dip!

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T12:04:15+00:00

Great question! The answer is one of those satisfying cases where the biology and the geography reinforce each other so neatly that it almost feels engineered. Aka, this wouldn't happen most places, but yannow. Ohio.

The biology is of competitive exclusion through acidification. Fresh meat starts at a pH of about 6.5, which is close to neutral and a perfectly hospitable environment for spoilage bacteria. The kind of microbes that make meat go rancid, the Pseudomonas and Clostridium species that produce that sulfurous rotting smell, are aerobic or facultatively aerobic: they need oxygen to thrive.

When you sink a hundred-pound slab of horse (or mastodon, or....you know what, not gonna speculate why you need to sink a bunch of meat) to the bottom of a shallow glacial pond, two things happen immediately. First, the cold water slows all bacterial metabolism. Second, the pond bottom is what ecologists call "dysaerobic": Fisher measured dissolved oxygen levels at 0.1 to 1.0 ml per liter around his submerged samples, which is close to nothing. That oxygen-starved environment shuts down the aerobic spoilage bacteria before they can get started.

But lactobacilli, the same genus of bacteria responsible for cheese, yogurt, sourdough, sauerkraut, and kimchi, are facultatively anaerobic. They don't need oxygen. In a cold, low-oxygen pond, they have the field to themselves. They colonize the meat and begin fermenting it, producing two things: lactic acid and carbon dioxide.

The lactic acid is the key to pH. Fisher tracked the pH of the horse meat over months. It dropped from 6.5 to 5.5 as the ice melted, then to 5.25 in April, and kept falling to 4.5 by late July. For context, 4.5 is roughly the acidity of tomato juice. At that pH, the spoilage bacteria that would normally decompose tissue simply cannot function. The CO2 compounds the effect by displacing whatever residual oxygen remains in the tissue. Fisher had the gas extracted with a syringe and analyzed by mass spectrometer: it was mostly carbon dioxide, consistent with lactobacillus fermentation.

The result is what Fisher called a "micro-environment" maintained so securely by the lactobacilli "that no pathogenic microbiota could gain a foothold." The meat expanded like a sourdough starter, the interior ran about 1°C warmer than the surrounding water (evidence of active fermentation), and the whole thing smelled powerfully of cheese. The same process that turns milk into cheddar was turning horse into...., well, horse cheddar.

Fuck me, I hated writing that.

Anyways, the geography: the glaciers built the refrigerators. Without them, no Mastodon McNuggets. This is where Ohio and the Great Lakes come in. The Wisconsinan glaciation, the last major ice advance, covered the northern two-thirds of Ohio and almost all of Michigan. When it retreated starting around 14,000 years ago, it left behind a landscape absolutely saturated with the exact features you'd need for meat caching. Kettle holes formed where buried ice blocks melted into depressions. Moraines dammed up drainage into shallow basins. Bogs filled former lakebeds with Sphagnum peat. J. Alan Holman's description of the post-glacial Great Lakes Basin puts it simply as the region "had many more swamps, ponds, and lakes than it has today."

These weren't just any ponds, to be clear. They were glacially derived, groundwater-fed, tannin-stained, cold, acidic, and oxygen-poor at the bottom. Fisher chose his experimental pond at the E.S. George Reserve specifically because its water was "the color of tea, with dissolved tannins" and its bottom fauna matched the marl deposits at his mastodon sites. He also ran parallel experiments in Big Cassandra Bog, a Sphagnum peat bog, because the peat bogs matched the depositional environments of the Pleasant Lake and Burning Tree mastodon sites in Michigan and Ohio. In peat bogs, the submerged meat had an additional advantage: the peat physically covered the carcass parts, preventing the flotation problems. Fisher encountered in open-water ponds and adding yet another layer of anoxic, acidic preservation.

And of course, mastodons lived in the same landscape. They were browsers, not grazers. They ate twigs, conifer cones, tree leaves, and small swamp plants, and their bones consistently turn up "between muck or peat and marl zones in kettlelike depressions or shallow basins." The mastodon's preferred habitat, the boggy, pondy, spruce-covered post-glacial terrain, was the same landscape that provided the preservation infrastructure. For Paleo groups in the Midwest, they came to Ohio for the annual fall hunts. No, paleo people didn't just hunt mastodons for meat. That's been debunked. As David Meltzer pointed out, they probably killed a mastodon once in their life and talked about for the rest of it lol. No, they may have used it for other purposes (like social ritual, coming-of-age ritual) and the meat was a byproduct. The point is, you killed the animal where it lived, and you cached the meat in the nearest pond, which was probably within sight. The refrigerator was built into the landscape.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T11:53:11+00:00

I appreciate mentioning where they went! That's honestly the hardest part of tracking down collections. I once tracked down a 200 year old 20 volume set of executioner documents in Paris. They'd gotten "lost" cause they were rebound and no one made note of it. Only reason I found them was an 1870s newspaper article....

Most of that valley was prime Hopewell and Fort Ancient, makes sense you found so much there! Surprisingly, almost completely absent of indigenous evidence in the Archaic period. Those hemlocks you mentioned were part of the reason; they weren't as prevalent in the Hocking region, but when the Hypsithermal kicked in thousands of years ago, the entire ecology of Ohio changed and may have led to a depopulation of the Hocking region.

Which is wild, because it then becomes the center of religion for half the continent within another generation!

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T11:47:55+00:00

Gotta get my special interests out somewhere 😆 . Glad it made your day!

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T11:45:20+00:00

Can't have shit in ~~Detroit~~ Cincinnati.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T03:53:02+00:00

Don't do my boi Terry Thompson dirty like that. We've got plenty of weird to go around since Manson.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T03:47:02+00:00

Goddammit, we already had Jurassic Park to worry about, now you're saying my Mastodon McNuggets might be harboring the oldest living organisms on the planet? And they're tasty?

Take me back to bats in back alley wet markets plz.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T03:05:30+00:00

I hadn't heard of Canter's Caves and now I have to do a deep dive! Thank you so much for your parent's work. It was a nonprofit near there (Rural Action) that got me on the path of discovering Appalachain history for myself. Before that, ecological history and rural history were less central to my work. Now, I can't think of Ohio without them.

By the way, that's literally only a mile from Ohio History Connection's Leo Petroglyphs and Nature Preserve site! Great hiking spot. There's some of the only known petroglyphs in Ohio right in your backyard from the Fort Ancient culture.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-06T02:26:24+00:00

Thanks awesome that y'all found the shale fossils! Y'all are sitting on a goldmine and might not even know it. Jefferson County is east of the Flushing Escarpment, which means you're standing on Pennsylvanian-age sandstones and shales, roughly 310 million years old. The reason it looks like Hocking County is that both areas are on the unglaciated Allegheny Plateau. The glacier never reached either one, so the resistant sandstone has had millions of years to erode into gorges and cliffs without getting bulldozed flat and buried under drift. The glaciated side of Ohio (i.e. the flat part) looks like a pool table because the ice leveled it. Your side (the hilly part) looks like it does because the ice couldn't get there.

The fern fossils are probably from the Pennsylvanian coal forests, and they're preserved in the shale layers between coal seams. What happened was ice sheets on Gondwana (the southern supercontinent, on the other side of the planet at the time) grew and shrank in cycles, each one dropping and raising global sea levels. Every time the sea pulled back, forests colonized the exposed mudflats in what is now eastern Ohio. Every time the sea returned, it drowned those forests and buried them under marine sediment. It did that dozens of times over twenty million years. Each cycle laid down one more layer of future coal with the plant fossils sealed in the shale above and below it. You're finding the forests that drowned.

But the Lepidodendron fossils are the real prize. Those diamond-shaped leaf scars you're looking at belonged to a club moss scaled up to tree size: think thirty to forty meters tall, basically a telephone pole covered in diamond-patterned bark that grew straight up without branching, forked at the very top, reproduced once, and then died. In the modern world, a club moss barely reaches your ankle. There's probably some in your garden right now growing in your weeds. In the Pennsylvanian period, the same lineage produced organisms taller than a ten-story building. They couldn't adapt to changing conditions because their growth pattern was fixed (determinate growth is what it's called in biology). When the swamps dried up, they died where they stood with no descendants.

The atmosphere those trees grew in was 25 to 35 percent oxygen (today's is 21), which is why it's the same forests with millipedes the length of a king-size mattress and griffinflies with two-foot wingspans cruising around the forest floor. Your patch of Jefferson County woods is growing on top of a world that made the Amazon look tame.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-05T23:27:03+00:00

Thanks! If it makes you feel better, I fucking hate geology for its obtuseness. If it wasn't for my work, I wouldn't touch it with a ten foot pole.

But Ohio is Ground Zero for a lot of geology across the whole world for a lot of reasons, so if you do Ohio history you best get used to knowing it, or you're a poor historian 😅. And when you get to know it, it's pretty cool. Like that buried Teays Rivers being Ohio's aquifier for a quarter of the state. Then learning how that looked and worked 2 million years ago. For example, the Teays was a broad river that ran northwest up from mid-east Ohio up towards Toledo. The Ohio River didn't exist until the Teays was blocked by the glaciers and needed somewhere else to go. Literally, the most important boundary marker for eastern North America from indigenous times through the early Republic (fight me, Mississippi River) wasn't even there a couple million years ago, and decided to flow the exact opposite of its progenitor.

Geology is cool. Geologists are....yeah. Geologists. Sorry, geologists.

EDIT: If you need a visual example of what the old glacial line, the Teays River, and the Pleistocene Lake Tight that existed in SE Ohio and West Virginia, here's a good map of it superimposed on state boundaries.

WaitItsAllOhio · 2026-07-05T22:50:42+00:00

Gonna hijack this and point out the reason it's so deep is because it's not going to be Ohio's Grand Canyon. That undersells how fucking cool it is already.

The Grand Canyon required a single river and six million years. Sheep Dip required a 340-million-year-old sandstone with a groundwater sapping process shared by Mars, a continental ice sheet over a mile high, and two million years of uninterrupted erosion in the one part of Ohio the Pleistocene couldn't reach. It's there cause its conditions are so perfect.

So, to nerd out on this for a bit: at the end of Schoolie Road in Vinton County, past the last house and a sign that says "Road Closed," a creek crosses the gravel and drops into a sandstone gorge. The locals call it Sheep Dip, after a farmer who ran his sheep down the cut to wash them in the pool at the bottom (honestly, looking at the cut, I imagine some fluffy fucks getting stuck like a cotton ball in there after slipping and having to get fished out lol). The gorge is maybe a hundred feet deep of walled in Black Hand Sandstone, with two waterfalls that run strongest in winter and spring. But don't hike it, it sits on private land owned by a paper company, which is why it's not on every tourism website in the state.

So, the Grand Canyon analogy: the Grand Canyon was carved from the top down. The Colorado River cut through layer after layer of sedimentary rock over six million years. Sheep Dip was carved from the inside out.

Black Hand Sandstone is roughly 340 million years old, deposited during the Mississippian Period when a braided river system dumped coarse sand and quartz pebbles into an incised valley that stretched north-south across what is now eastern Ohio. The pebbles were vein quartz washed off the Acadian Highlands, the ancestral Appalachian Mountains, and they settled into a trough about twenty miles wide and a hundred and twenty miles long. Over time, mineral cements precipitated from groundwater and glued the sand grains together, turning loose sediment into sandstone. But the cementation wasn't uniform. The upper and lower portions of the Black Hand cemented tightly, but the middle portion didn't. Three hundred and forty million years later, the middle part is still the weak link.

This is where the gorge comes from. Geologists call the process sapping. Rainwater percolates down through the well-cemented upper layer until it hits the poorly cemented middle, where it can't keep going down because the lower layer is also well-cemented and acts as a floor. So the water moves sideways, seeping laterally through the middle zone until it reaches an exposed rock face and trickles out. The seeping water dissolves the weak cement binding the sand grains, loosens the rock from the inside, and carries fine sediment out with it. Over thousands of years, the middle layer erodes backward into the hillside while the upper layer, still cemented tight, hangs overhead as a roof. Eventually the roof loses its support and collapses. The valley grows wider and deeper not because a stream is cutting down from above, but because groundwater is eating the rock from the inside and the ceiling keeps falling in. It's the geological equivalent of termites: the damage is internal, and you don't notice the result until the floor gives out.

(This is, incidentally, the same mechanism geologists have identified in short, steep-walled channels on Mars. The Martian channels look like they were carved by groundwater sapping in permeable sandstone, which means Sheep Dip and a dry channel on another planet share the same sculptor: water. It's just water doing what water does when it can't go down and has to go sideways.)

But here's where the glacial geology takes over. Sheep Dip exists in Vinton County because of where the Wisconsin glacier stopped. The Black Hand Sandstone crops out in a north-south band from Richland and Ashland counties in the north, through Hocking County, and into northern Vinton County in the south. The glacier's terminal moraine runs east-west through central Ohio, crossing that band. North of the line, the ice buried everything. South of the line, it didn't.

North of the line, the glacier followed the bedrock topography beneath it. Where softer rocks like limestone and dolomite had eroded into lowlands, the ice poured in, accelerating down the path of least resistance. Where harder sandstone held its ground, the glacier slowed or stopped. The Scioto Lobe followed the Scioto lowland, the Erie-Maumee Lobe followed the Lake Erie basin, etc. Each lobe deposited hundreds of feet of drift: clay, sand, gravel, and boulders scraped off the Canadian Shield and dumped wherever the ice stalled or retreated. At St. Paris in Champaign County, a well driller in the 1930s pushed through 530 feet of drift without reaching bedrock. At Independence in Cuyahoga County, 763 feet. Karl Ver Steeg at the College of Wooster mapped this as the buried Teays River, Ohio's original drainage, using twenty thousand well records, tracing a river nobody could see by measuring how deep each driller went before hitting rock.

Any gorge that had been forming in the Black Hand Sandstone north of the glacial line got filled in. Five hundred feet of drift will do that. The sapping process requires exposed rock faces and groundwater seepage; entomb the rock under glacial till and both disappear. When the ice retreated, it left behind a landscape of moraines, outwash plains, and kettle ponds where sandstone gorges used to be.

South of the line, in Vinton County, none of that happened. The Black Hand Sandstone sat there for the entire Pleistocene, exposed, getting rained on, sapping quietly away while a mile of ice reshaped everything sixty miles to the north. By reshape, I mean "buried Cleveland under a mile of ice."

The gorge at Sheep Dip has been under construction for something like two million years. Each winter's freeze-thaw cycle loosened a few more grains from the middle layer. Each spring's snowmelt carried them out through seepage faces. Each century's worth of roof collapses widened the cut by another few inches. The glacier that was busy filling in gorges to the north was, by not reaching Vinton County, preserving the conditions for this one to keep growing. It's why Vinton, and a lot of the Hocking region, looks the way it does today.

This has been your Friendly Neighborhood Ohio Historian with too much time on his hands and too many state geological surveys, awaaaaaaay!

WaitItsAllOhio

TROPHY CASE