THE CATSKILL GEOLOGISTS BY PROFESSORS ROBERT AND JOHANNA TITUS - The Mills Mansion 2 Mrs Mills Marine Menagerie

CATSKILL - We have started a series of columns focused on the Mills’ Mansion (AKA “Staatsburgh”), located on the east side of the Hudson, Yep, that’s not within the region that the Mountain Eagle usually covers, but we want you to get out more and learn to see the geology wherever you go. But still, that begs a question. Why are we writing about a Gilded Age mansion? What kind of geology could possibly be there?  And it only gets worse; we are going to spend most of our time today indoors. Shouldn’t geology be an outdoors, field science? Well – maybe not - especially now that it is winter. When we were first taking the tour, we could hardly help but to pay close attention to the stone tabletops that you can see throughout the mansion. How many stone tabletops do you have in your home? Probably few - if any. Stone is a lot more expensive than other materials. It has to be quarried, and working the surfaces is a difficult and expensive process. But The Mills family were wealthy, very wealthy; they could afford the best of everything. So, it came as no shock to see what we saw there. But we were very pleasantly surprised to see exactly what kind of stone that was there. Take a look at our first photo.

That, we recognized, is a fine-grained marine sandstone. These sands came from the bottom of some ancient ocean. There are no records of who fashioned this stone or where it came from, but there is so much more here than just the stone.Those structures within it are fossils. Most of the ones we see in this photo, the ones at the bottom, to the right and at the tiop are shellfish called brachiopods. In life they would have reminded you of clams; they have two shells, just as clams do, but they are actually a whole different category of invertebrate animal. That chambered fossil in the left center is something that is called a nautiloid. It’s a close cousin of the modern squids that swim modern seas. We will see a better one next week. It’s never all that easy to surprise us but the next fossil did. See our second photo. That’s, we think, a coral. See the chambers. Each one, in life, was a separate coral animal, again just like the modern living forms. It took us back a step or two to imagine a coral right there on a tabletop at Staatsburgh!

So, in the end, most people see stone tabletops here, but we geologists see ancient sea floors. Would you like to see what we see? Take a look at our third picture, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. We would like to imagine that Mrs. Ruth Livingston Mills was the person who purchased this marvelous furniture but in fact we don’t know that. Nevertheless, it did add a great deal to our visit. We hope that you can see some of these when you take the tour.

Contact the authors at randjtitus@prodigy.net. Join their facebook page “The Catskill Geologist.” Read their blogs at “thecatskillgeologist.com.”