At Carver the clay used occurs 50 to 90 feet above the river, as a stratum from 30 to 40 feet thick, overlain and underlain by sand, being included in the modified drift which formerly filled this part of the valley. It probably was deposited during the retreat of the ice-sheet which overspread this region, as shown by the interglacial clay at Chaska, after the valley had been excavated between its bluffs of till. J. M. Nye & Co. here make 300 to 500 thousand bricks yearly… (The Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, The Eighth Annual Report for the Year 1879, Submitted to the President of the University, Feb. 18, 1880, The Pioneer Press Company, St. Paul, MN, 1880, Page 119)
The brick yards are operated, one by J. M. Nye & Co., which made last year 1,250,000 brick; the other by Ahline & Co. (History of the Minnesota Valley, Including the Explorers and Pioneers of Minnesota, Rev. Edward D. Neill, North Star Publishing Company, Minneapolis, 1882, Page 369)
Page 132. The excavation of Nye & Co. at Carver, where the exposure is four rods long and 15 feet high, with about the same elevation above the Minnesota river as the foregoing, exhibits the same stratification, except that here the layers all have a nearly uniform thickness of three inches. There is a tendency to split at the darker partings, which are seen to extend continuously, never passing one into another, and preserving a very constant width of three inches apart, through the whole of the section exposed. They are from an eighth to three-quarters of an inch thick, gradually merging above and below into the less dark clay that makes up the principal mass of these layers. The bedding is nearly level, but dips 1° to 2° away at each side. In this depth of 15 feet there are thus about sixty layers, all closely alike. The alternating conditions which produced them were evidently repeated sixty times in uninterrupted succession. The only explanation for this which seems possible is that these divisions mark so many years occupied by the deposition of this clay. It appears that these clay-beds are of limited extent. The broad flood-plain was mainly built up by additions of fine gravel and sand spread over its surface by floods like those which now occasionally overflow the bottomlands. Clay could settle only where hollows were formed by inequalities in this deposition and left outside the path of the principal current. Now nearly all the features of the modified drift, as the general absence of shells or other fossils, its hillocks and ridges called kames, and its occurrence only in glaciated regions or in valleys of drainage from them, indicate that this formation was accumulated by streams discharged from a melting ice-sheet. If the origin of the modified drift that filled the lower part of the Minnesota valley was from such glacial melting, it is apparent that the floods would be greater and would bring and deposit more sediment in summer than in winter. Layers nearly like those in the clay at Carver and Jordan are also seen in other clay-beds in this valley and in that of the Mississippi in this state. The principal mass of each layer is regarded as the deposition during the warm portion of a year, and the very dark partings as the sediment during winter when the melting was less and the water consequently less turbid. At the excavation of Nye & Co., a few light gray or almost white laminae were seen in the thicker and less dark part of these layers, their thickness being from a hundredth to an eighth of an inch. The upper part of these
Page 133. beds of clay are generally colored yellow to a depth varying from one or two to ten feet, the lower portion being blue. (A Report on the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, 1882-1885, Volume II, N. H. Winchell and Warren Upham, Pioneer Press Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1888)
At Carver the bank from which J. M. Nye & Co. obtain their clay for brick-making, situated in the west part of the village, has its base 50 feet and its top 110 feet, approximately, above the river. The section, in descending order, is fine, light yellow sand, 20 feet; gravel, with interstratified sand, very coarse in its upper layer, which holds rock-fragments up to one and two feet in diameter, 24 feet; clay, yellowish in its upper one to one and a half feet, and dark bluish for 15 feet of vertical exposure, forming the lower part of this section, below which it is said to extend 15 feet more, having a total thickness of 30 feet. The top of this clay varies in height, and two rods east of the excavation, from which this description was taken, it rises ten feet higher. The peculiar stratification exhibited here and at Jordan has been described and discussed in a preceding part of this chapter. Brick-making was begun here about eight years ago. The annual product is from 300 to 500 thousand, sold at $5 to $6 per thousand. These bricks are cream-colored and of excellent quality. Sand is used to temper this clay in the proportion of one of the former to two or three of the latter. (A Report on the Geological and Natural History Survey of Minnesota, 1882-1885, Volume II, N. H. Winchell and Warren Upham, Pioneer Press Company, St. Paul, Minnesota, 1888, Page 145)