Mahanoy City High School - Maroon and Black Yearbook (Mahanoy City, PA)

Page 8 text:

2-' ' -3 THE L YER CAKE FILLED ITH BURIED SU SHI E HERIL is a huge layer Cake in eastern Penn- sylvania-a cake so big that it covers eight counties -nearly five hundred square miles! Inside this monstrous cake are many layers of stone and dirt, and strangest of all-fourteen separate layers of a hard, black substance Hlled with the Warm sunshine of ages ago! For a long, long time, Nature kept the cake hidden in the heart of the hills under a heavy blanket of trees. Then, at last, man found it and Cut out pieces for you and me. Instead of eating these pieces, we use them to keep us warm! The strange, black substance is Nature's finest fU6lTANTHRAl1l'I4E, or HARD COAL.

Page 7 text:

5,4 gxfx if X B4aroon. and Black 1935 Tublishea' by SENIOR CLASS Of NIAPIANOY CITY HIGH SCHGOL MAHANOY CITY, PENNSYLVANIA Q 7 Fxxggg

Page 9 text:

The story goes back to when the Earth was young. Geologists say that Nature mixed our layer cake two hundred and fifty million years ago! Things were very different then. Human beings could not have lived, for the atmosphere contained so much carbonic gas that it would have been poisonous to human lungs. But there were trees and plants like nothing human eyes have ever seen growing. Great, scaly trees reached up into a sky from which warm rains and floods of sunshine bathed a steaming world. Curious giant plants, different from any we now have, filled the swamps with a thick, tangled growth. Forests far more luxuriant than our densest trop- ical jungles flourished where the hills of Pennsyl- vania now rise. Soft mud took their impressions, the mud hardened into rock, and there we find the record of bygone life, the fossils. We know from these fossils that there were fern trees with trunks five feet in diameter, and club mosses often grew to a height of forty or fifty feet. These were the filling of our layer cake! Without sunshine, green plants will not grow. Wfith it they grow greatly. In those ancient days --which actually lasted for millions of years- alternately flooded with sunshine and drenched with warm rains, the vegetation charged up the sunshine and the soil elements into vast quantities of carbon-the chief element of coal.