Wandering With William Bartram: The Section At Silver Bluff, South Carolina

In his famous book, William Bartram (1791) described a stratigraphic section at Silver Bluff on the Savannah River in Aiken County, South Carolina, as dark, laminated clay containing belemnites, overlain by clays, sand, marl, and a shelly bed containing numerous oysters. There are now no known occurrences of marine megafossils in outcrops along the Savannah in Aiken County. The wording of Bartram's description of Cretaceous outcrops along the Cape Fear River in North Carolina indicates that the lower part of the Silver Bluff section was described from notes made on the Cape Fear and from his father's diary. The description of the upper beds at Silver Bluff may have been transferred from the Cape Fear, where fossiliferous Pliocene beds overlie the Cretaceous. It is probable, however, that it was from notes made at an Eocene locality in Georgia, most likely Shell Bluff on the Savannah River.