History of Oakland County Michigan a narrative account of its historic progress, its people, its principal interests / compiled from the official records of the county, the newspapers and data of personal interviews, under the editorial supervision of Thaddeus D. Seeley.

12

HISTORY OF OAKLAND COUNTY

This sketch would not be complete without some mention of the origin
of this drift.
It is now the accepted theory of geologists that this great body of
drift has been ground up, worn and deposited in its present situation and
condition by glaciers and moving waters; and geologists are now able to
satisfactorily account for its origin. I cannot take space to give the
various theories that have been advanced to account for the changes of
climate which were necessary to produce and melt away those monstrous
glaciers. It is sufficient here to assume as a fact that former great
changes in the climate of North America took place, and that within a
comparatively recent period in its geological history this county was
covered with glacial ice such as is now found on the high table lands of
Greenland and on the Antarctic continent at the south pole. The existence of vast coal beds and tropical fossils (petrifications), in the Arctic
regions is one of the evidences of such great differences in the climate
between former and recent times. Neither was the glacial age continuous and uninterrupted, but there were interglacial colder and warmer
periods when the glaciers advanced or melted away and retreated only
to advance again. A great part of Oakland county is now, except as
modified by snows, rains, streams and ponds, in substantially the same
condition in which it was left by the last glaciers. Wherever the reader
has seen hills or banks of clay, sand, and boulders entirely unstratified
he can assume that they are now just as they were left by the glaciers.
Perhaps nowhere can be seen better exhibits of recent glacial drift than
are found in Waterford and White Lake, west of Mace Day lake. Many
of the bowls and hollows are today without outlets and substantially as
left by the ice sheet. Similar illustrations can be seen in many other
places in the northerly and westerly parts of the county. Heaven Hill,
in White Lake, the Bald Mountain ridge, the Grampian Hills of Addison,
and, in fact, most of the hills of this county are substantially as they were
left by the glaciers. Oakland county's four hundred lakes are due to
the hollows and depressions left by the last glaciers. They show that,
geologically speaking, this is a new country. In time all these hills will
be rounded down and all the lakes filled with earth or emptied of their
water, by the wearing down of their outlets. In the water-washed southeasterly part of the county there are no lakes left; all have been filled and
obliterated by the action of the waves.
To account for these glaciers it is not necessary to imagine any very
great elevation of the lands northerly of us. Centuries of snow piled up
farther north and, unmelted and accumulated until they had become
thousands of feet thick, was sufficient to furnish all the elevation necessary to force the glaciers. southward across this county. The great
weight of such a body of snow would suffice not only to change it into
ice but would from pressure alone, convert it into a semiliquid state. In
such a condition a glacier will flow, slowly of course, down a declivity
little above a dead level and even force itself uphill over a ridge. They
may not have moved at a velocity as great as fifty feet in a year, but
they did their grinding, crushing work just as effectually, and their underlying and lateral streams of water helped to wear, assort and round the
pebbles, gravel and boulders brought by the ice lobe.