Robert Herd Fairbairn History of Chickasaw and Howard Counties, Iowa

Annotation

Whilst the greatest effort has been made to ensure the quality of this text, due to the historical nature of this content, in some rare cases there may be minor issues with legibility. The topography of Chickasaw County shows few striking features of any kind. In general the surface is a plain modified by only a small amount of relief. With the exception of some small areas in the western part of Bradford and Chickasaw townships, the whole county is covered with the Iowan drift, which remains unaltered and uneroded, precisely as it was left at the time of the withdrawal of the Iowan glaciers. In places the Iowan drift mantle was thick enough to disguise the pre-iowan topography and develop the typical, gently undulating Iowan plain. In places the latest drift was too thin to do more than slightly modify the older, erosional topography. An unusual number of streams traverse the county - the general trend being from northwest to southeast - and divide the surface into a corresponding number of long, 'narrow inter-stream areas. The streams follow broad, shallow troughs in the surface, in places two, three, or four miles in width. The narrow divides between the broad valleys vary in topographic types from areas of pronounced hills and swells and minor irregularities, to upland plains diversified by only low, fiat, long sweeping undulations. The typical Iowan plain is exemplified in the northern part of the northern townships, Deerfield, Washington, Jacksonville and Utica. New Hampton is located in the center of such a plain, and the same type of plain surrounds Ionia, stretching away to the horizon in nearly every direction. The gently undulating plain, developed by the constructive and moulding effects of glacial ice, and not by erosion, is the predominant type of topography throughout the county. There are a number of areas, especially in the eastern part of the county, so level that drainage is still very imperfect, and crops suffer accord ingly when seasons are more than usually wet.