Before entering into a detail relative to the settlement of this town
by Europeans, the causes of their emigration from the fatherland,
their manner of life in this then wilderness part of our country,
&c., &c., I will give my views of what I consider to have been
anteriorly the geographical face of this district of territory, its
productions and its native inhabitants.
The present form of the surface of the earth teaches us that there
has been a time when it was in many places very different from what
it is at this day. This appears to be the case wherever there are
rivers and streams of water; and we have reason to think that many
lakes and ponds have been drained by the action of streams of water
issuing therefrom. It must be the case that there was a time when the
surface of the ground in the valley along the Neversink and Delaware
rivers in this town, together with that part of it which extends
southwest to the gap of the mountain, where the Delaware passes
through it, and northeast to the North river, &c., laid below the
bottom of a lake of water. This opinion has been formed previous to
my contemplations respecting it. Eager gives some account of this in
his "History of Orange County," pages 407 and 408, and sufficiently
establishes the fact from Indian tradition, &c.
Not only does the gap of the mountain, where the river passes through
it, exhibit strong reasons of a passage being worn through it by the
action of the water of a lake in this valley, but the knolls and low
hills in this valley show that they have undergone much washing of
water; and, what appears somewhat mysterious, hills thirty and forty
feet higher than the surface of the river flats are all composed of
ground, gravel, sand and such smooth stones as are in the bottoms of
rivers, from which it appears that not only the surface of those
hills, but that all the materials of which they are composed, have
for some length of time been water-washed. We find in them some
places of clear sand, not mixed with the other materials mentioned,
such as is in river sand banks; from which we have reason to
conjecture that after the water received a passage through the
mountain it created a current in the lake towards it, and as that
passage enlarged and wore down, the water in the lake drew off and
the current of its stream increased and washed the highest parts of
its bottom down into the hollows, where the water was deep, and
thereby run down gradually large bodies of water-washed stones,
gravel, sand and ground from the highest elevations of the bottom
surface into its lowest parts, many of which have remained where they
have been carried by the waters, and the adjoining ground, which
first was highest, has run down the stream and continued to be moved
down until a gradual descent of the rivers was formed, on a bottom of
smooth water-washed stones, gravel and sand, which now lie at
different depths below the surface of the river flats, viz.: from
about four to seven and eight feet below that of the lands along the
Neversink river, and at greater depths along the surface of the
Delaware river flats.
After a river bottom was formed where the flats now are, the stream
creating meandering channels through those river bottom flats would
contain the water of the rivers when low, but in freshets, overflow
the flat bottoms, whereby in every freshet a part of the ground which
the water carried down in such times, lodged on the surface of those
flats, which, continuing to accumulate in this way for a great length
of time, raised the surface so high that the freshets did not
overflow it, unless partially in uncommon high water; and as the
waters became more and more confined in stationary channels, the
bottoms of these wore down by the action and weight of the water. In
this manner undoubtedly was formed the soil of our river lands. In
the vicinity of the gap of the Shawangunk mountain, through which the
New York & Erie Railroad passes, are indications in some places on
the east side of the mountain of the surface of the ground having in
a very remote period of time been under water, when I contemplate it
ran through this gap into the valley west of the mountain into a lake
which has been mentioned.
All rivers and streams have formed the grade of their bottoms from
their summits toward the ocean according to their magnitude, and the
original formation of the respective districts of country through
which they pass.
The river flats, amounting to about three or four thousand acres, was
nearly all the land in this town which the first pioneers considered
to be of any value for agricultural purposes, the residue being
generally mountainous, rough, stony land, was by them considered to
be of no value for farming purposes.