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It Started a Million Years Ago By the Millburn Centennial Committee
Originally appeared in 1957 |
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It has been just a century since Millburn Township was
created. One hundred years is a goodly time as the days
of man are reckoned, but the pre-birth days recede into
the limitless past, and who can tell how it was at the be-
ginning! We know a little from the learned ones, searching
the answers in curious marks on boulders, in erosion, in
the composition of rocks, and in the disclosed outcrop.
This pleasant land of gentle hills and valleys was for
millions of years the center of natural disturbances of
titanic proportions.
More than once in ages past, oceans flowed across the
land, channelling and eroding. but also building up, as they
left behind them as they disappeared, deep deposits of
sedimentary materials, and mud and sand. which in the
processes of time became the bedrock shale and sandstone.
Across the mud the giant reptiles walked, leaving their
footprints forever impressed in the hardening rock.
Interbedded with the shale and sandstone now are thick
sheets of basalt (traprock). The trapock is harrd, fine=grained and dense, and was formed by the cooling of great
masses of molten lava which, in three or more periods of
volcanic activity, flowed over the softer rock, and was in
turn buried under younger sediments. These three lava
layers primarily compose the two Watchung ridges of
which First Mountain is a part.
Sometime, too, in that dimly seen prehistoric age, a
raging river coursing from the north, estimated to be 475
feet below the present surface, and now believed to be the
ancient Hudson diverted from its course by a slow process
of erosion, cut gaps and passes in the vulnerable rock.
Some such relentless and timeless struggle between water
and rock tore a two-mile gap in the ridge and separated
First (or South) Mountain from the Watchung range,
leaving between the two heights an undulating plain. One
end of that great cleavage, rising more than 500 feet above
the future village, would, one day, be called "Washington
Rock", but that day was still millions of years away.
But the land was not yet ready for the coming of man.
The great ice sheets moved down in three successive
stages, grindng and scouring the hills and valleys, and
pushing before them mountains of gravel, sand, and other
glacial debris known generally as the terminal moraine.
Later as the drifts of moraine filled the Short Hills' and
other gaps, and blocked the flow of rivers, and melting
ice, water backed up in the great basin thus formed, and
Lake Passaic came into being. It occupied all the upper
Passaic Valley between the Highlands on the northwest
and Second Watchung Mountain on the south, and east.
As the ice retreated the gap at Little Falls re-appeared,
and Lake Passaic became extinct.
In the glacial ages many strange animals inhabited the
land wwe call New Jersey, and followed the retreating ice
northward. The bones and skulls of mastodons, walrus,
reindeer, and Canadian elk have been found in nearby
places.
Finally, the air grew warmer and the last vestige of ice
disappeared, leaving behind it, in its wake, masses of
terminal moraine, kettle holes and ridges, and those knobby
rises called, as soon as names were given to topographical
landmarks, "the short hills."
We may presume that upon this land, finally tamed by
water, volcano, and glacier, the forests sprang up and man
stalked among the trees.
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