Monroe County: Land of Sinks
Monroe County is a rich, agriculturally blessed county with fine apple orchards, wineries, trout water, historic springs, farmland, and saltpetre (saltpeter)caves. Since settler times it has been called "the land of sinks" for its many sinkholes. One community is called Sinks Grove because of this terrain. It contains the Second Creek Watershed, which is maintained by Friends of THE Second Creek Watershed. The birthplace of American Paleontology began in the late 18th-century with the discovery of the Megalonyx Jeffersonii (Thomas Jefferson's Three-toed Sloth) in its Haynes Cave. Haynes Cave is believed to be approximately 2 to 5 million years old. Monroe County has the USGS station on its side of the town of Alderson, West Virginia, where the public gleans much useful data about temperature, pH, flow, and dissolved oxygen. Much work has been launched in efforts to study the karstic hydrology of this county. Recently the entire Second Creek Watershed was designated an historic watershed by the state of West Virginia.
Read more about this topic: Greenbrier River Watershed Association
Famous quotes containing the words monroe, land and/or sinks:
“Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of the minority rights belonging to the few remaining earthbound stars. All we demanded was our right to twinkle.”
—Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962)
“What between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death, land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up. That’s all that can be said about land.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author—detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower’s pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl’s lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)