The Michigan Puddingstone

Steven Wade Veatch

Michigan’s puddingstones are intriguing rocks that look like a glob of pudding stuffed with raisins, nuts and bits of cranberries. These white rocks, with small red, brown, purple and black pebbles, are not a Michigan product. During the last ice age, they hitched a ride into Michigan on an ice sheet and got off in the southern part of the state when the ice melted.

Fig. 1. An unpolished puddingstone from Michigan. Some contain trace amounts of gold and diamonds. These rocks are commonly found just after farmers plow their fields in Michigan.  Puddingstones were brought to Michigan by Ice Age glaciers. Jo Beckwith Specimen.  Photo by S.W. 

Puddingstones went through several steps in their formation (in what is now part of Ontario in Canada), before they went on their journey to Michigan. First, a network of rapidly flowing streams tumbled red and coffee-brown jasper, funeral-black chert, hematite and quartz in their churning water. Next, the streams deposited the material as sedimentary fill in eroded troughs and as alluvial fans, when the streams reduced their velocity and scattered the colorful pebbles onto mounds of sand (Lowey, 1985; Baumann et al. 2001). 

Then, the sand and pebbles hardened beneath the Earth’s surface and, over time, formed sedimentary rocks known as conglomerates (Slawson, 1933).  Later, intense heat and pressure metamorphosed the matrix of sand into a light-colored, coarse-grained, sugary-textured quartzite that tightly held the pebbles (Schaetzl, n.d.).  These geological forces formed the puddingstones around 2.3 billion years ago.

Today, geologists recognize these conglomerates as part of the Lorrain Quartzite of the Cobalt Series (Door and Eschman, 1970). This rock formation occurs as thick beds at Saint Joseph Island in Northern Ontario, Canada. The conglomerates also are found by the Saint Mary's River north of the Bruce Mines. This area is located 65 km (40 miles) east of Sault Sainte Marie in Ontario.

Puddingstones traveled south during the last ice age with the immense Laurentide Ice Sheet as it flowed at a glacial pace down from Canada. This ice plucked the puddingstones from the underlying bedrock, carried them hundreds of kilometers, and delivered those rocks to Michigan about 24,000 years ago.

  

This slowly advancing ice plowed across the landscape for thousands of years until rising temperatures, brought on by a climatic shift, ended their movement in Michigan. As the glacial ice melted, it deposited glacial till that contained the puddingstones. 

Today, farmers in the southern part of Michigan find puddingstones after spring plowing.  Since tightly cemented puddingstones can be cut and polished, they are in demand by Michigan artists and crafters, who make jewelry and ornaments out of them.  Puddingstones are commonly found as garden decorations that adorn Michigan homes and farms. People also collect and display puddingstones for their striking colors and appearance. 

Fig. 2. Since puddingstones are so hard, they take a nice polish as seen in this example. 
Steven Veatch specimen. Photo by S.W. Veatch.

In fact, as grandparents and parents take children outside to hunt for puddingstones, they pass an interest in puddingstones and geology down through generations of Michigan families. The tradition of looking for these goes back to the settlement of Michigan, and there is no sign of this interest ending anytime soon. 

References cited:

Baumann, S. D., J. T. Arrospide, and A. E. Wolosyzn, 2011, Preliminary Redefinition of the Cobalt Group (Huronian Supergroup), in the Southern Geologic Province, Ontario, Canada. Midwest Institute of Geosciences and Engineering, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Door, J. A. and Eschman, D., 1970, Geology of Michigan: Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press.

Lowey, G.W., 1985, Stratigraphy and Sedimentology of the Lorrain Formation, Huronian Supergroup (Aphebian), Between Sault Ste. Marie and Elliot Lake, Ontario, and Implications for Stratiform Gold Mineralization, Open File Report no. 1154. Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa, Canada.

Schaetzl, R. J. (n.d.), Geography of Michigan and the Great Lakes Region. Retrieved, from http://geo.msu.edu/extra/geogmich/Puddingstones.html on January 22, 2020.

Slawson, C. B., 1933, The Jasper Conglomerate, an Index of Drift Dispersion. The Journal of Geology, Vol. 41, No. 5, p. 546–52.

The Miner’s Photograph: A Pathway to the Past

By Steven Wade Veatch

This photograph, taken around 1899, shows my ancestors posing at their modest frame home, where they lived one step away from Cripple Creek’s gold rush world of cardplayers, whisky drinkers, and midnight carousers. The scene depicts my great-grandfather (Robert Pickering Plews), my great-grandmother (Janet Plews), and two of their daughters in front of their miner’s cabin, built from pine boards, on a hillside in the newly established mining town of Elkton, Colorado.

Robert Plews (32), with two daughters, Elizabeth (4) and Mabel (3) and his wife Janet (25), stand in front of their small home in Elkton, Colorado, one of the towns in the Cripple Creek Mining District. Photo date circa 1899, from the S. W. Veatch collection.

My great-grandparents were from England. Two years after my great-grandfather married my great-grandmother, he left England—by himself—to build a better life in Cripple Creek’s goldfields for the family that he left behind.

Robert Plews was a hope-chaser. He carried his dreams from England across the Atlantic and then 1,700 miles to the Front Range and Cripple Creek. He arrived in the gold mining district in 1897. Victoria was the Queen of England, William McKinley was the US President, and Marconi had sent his first wireless transmission. The Colorado Rockies meant a new chance for him at a place with unlimited opportunities. He went to work at the busy Elkton mine. After my great-grandfather established himself in the mining camp, he sent for his wife, and two daughters, Elizabeth and Mabel, who were still in England. They left Newcastle in the northeast of England in 1899 and immigrated to Elkton.

I discovered this photograph recently, tucked away in an old box. I am drawn to this image’s simple charm. It’s a staged scene: the family hired a photographer, dressed up and posed for the camera. And, it would not have been an inexpensive endeavor at the time. The photo is an affirmation of their place and position in society. My great-grandparents wanted to preserve this sense of success in a new country.

In the photograph, the modest home in the mining camp is a tidy place. My great-grandfather raised six daughters there. A seventh daughter later grew up in Cañon City, Colorado. Great-grandfather Plews was the strict English father of legend, who made all of his daughters behave at a time when children were to be seen and not heard.

In stark contrast to the rustic cabin, everyone is dressed as if they came from a holiday party, not a rough-and-tumble mining camp. The clothes are stylish and expensive. My great-grandfather is smartly attired. A simple watch fob hangs out of a pocket of his waistcoat. He wears sleeve garters on his ready-made shirt. Shirts in those days came in only one sleeve length; and the garters allowed him to adjust the sleeve so that the cuffs were the correct length. My great-grandmother’s long dark dress covers her high-button shoes. She covers her abdomen with her hand and arm, as did many women of the day who were pregnant. She was pregnant with my great-aunt Emma. The two young girls, newly arrived from England, are in white dresses. One has ribbons in her hair.

According to my grandmother, my great-grandfather satisfied his hunger for learning by reading books late into the night, some of which were about mining. His hunger for education resulted in several promotions at the Elkton mine. He eventually became the hoist operator there. While he worked at the mine, the shafts sank lower and lower, and the horizontal drifts dug deeper into the rich goldfields, while tailings piled up on the surface. My great-grandfather worked at the Elkton mine for 21 years.

This photograph is a path for me into my past. I can connect with my great-grandfather and imagine his days of mining, and how that work somehow reached through several generations to me, explaining, in part, my interest in mining and geology from an early age. I can envision how my great-grandmother baked, cooked, cleaned and sewed for a family of nine. And I think of their lives, deeply lived in Colorado’s last gold rush.

Today, the cabin is no longer there; modern gold mining operations replaced it and the town of Elkton. Yet, everything my great-grandfather created there would live on through his seven girls, their children and beyond. I am a direct descendant of one of his daughters, and remain deeply rooted to the Cripple Creek Mining District.