The columns on Titan’s Pier lie across the river from the Northampton-Holyoke road in the narrow gap at Mount Tom station. The basalt flow is inclined 15° southeastward, and the columns stand perpendicular to the surface—hence they are inclined with respect to the water level. Doubtless the devil docked his boat on the gently inclined rock surface of the cove on the downstream side of the pier.
Titan’s Piazza is situated east of the road to the Mount Holyoke House. It is an extremely narrow ledge backed by a stockade of columns. The front of the piazza is literally strewn with wreckage from the house, for a slope over 100 feet high is covered with angular pieces of basalt which have fallen from the back wall. The lower ends of the columns break off into shallow hexagonal saucers with the concave sides up. Many have slid down the slope, to the delight of the birds that bathe in them. Higher up the cliff, the saucers become deeper, and towards the top the columns scale on into bullet shaped masses.
Westfield Marble Quarry
Anyone who drives westward on the Jacob’s Ladder route from Springfield passes first through the open, rolling country of the Connecticut Lowland. Hills are in sight, but they seem remote until he leaves Westfield, and there the upland rises before him like a 900-foot wall. The road uses the gateway cut in the wall by the Westfield River, and the drive westward towards the headwaters of the river is one of the best known scenic attractions in western Massachusetts. But a greater treat awaits the person who will venture southward on the road along the Little Westfield River. It follows the canyon brink about 500 feet above the stream. Near the hilltop, a side road turns north to the Westfield Marble quarry, which provides a vantage point overlooking fifty miles of country to the north, east and south.
The Westfield River meanders eastward across the flat lowland. Its banks are terraced, each level cut in the lake beds or in the delta which the river built in glacial Lake Springfield. The scalloped margins of the terraces are the extremities of meander loops which developed when the river was not entrenched as deeply in the unconsolidated deposits as it is today.
The flatness of the twenty-mile strip of lowland is impressive, for it ends only at the Wilbraham Mountains, eight miles east of Springfield. Beneath the lowland lie soft and gently dipping sandstones and sandy shales, capped by a thin veneer of lake clays and river sands. The shales are the youngest Triassic beds remaining in the region, and they outcrop between Thompsonville and Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Younger shales above them succumbed to Tertiary erosion.
The Wilbraham Mountains are granite and gneiss which formed the roots of the ancient Triassic ranges. Their present accordant summits are a tribute to the leveling activities which running water performed on a quiescent land, whereas the deep V-shaped valleys incised in the level summits record uplift and quickened erosion in Tertiary and glacial time. Indeed, the lowland itself owes its existence to the power of rejuvenated streams working on non-resisting rocks.
The Holyoke and Mount Tom ranges are visible far to the northeast, and a chain of low hills connects Tom with the ridges between Hartford and Avon, Connecticut. These linear hills surmount the lowland because they are made of basaltic lava, which is better able to resist the rain and the weather than the sandstones and shales above and below. Scattered flat-topped hills between Southwick and Granby are sheets of basalt-like rock called diabase, which was inserted between a sandstone roof and floor. Nowhere can one better appreciate the highly individualized imprint which each geological element has made upon the central New England landscape.
The Old Lead Mines
The colonial period in our nation’s history was characterized by an ignorance of its mineral wealth and a dependence upon Europe for most raw materials, especially essential metals. During the War for Independence, European supplies were cut off, and Yankee ingenuity had to make the most of local deposits of metallic minerals. It was not long before mines were in operation on several lead veins in the Connecticut Valley, yielding a supply of lead for the duration of the war. But the mines were small, and most of them were soon abandoned, remaining only as historical sites, or as collecting localities for the mineralogist. Five of these old deposits are still accessible: four lie west of the valley at Loudville, West Farms, Hatfield, and Williamsburg; an important one is situated east of the valley at Leverett. All are very similar in geology and mineralogy, yet each possesses its own individuality.