Near Flora, in Madison County, Mississippi, the ground is full of stone logs. The Mississippi Petrified Forest is one of only two petrified forests in the eastern United States, the other being the Gilboa Fossil Forest in New York: forty acres of private land where the trunks of ancient firs, maples and an extinct cypress called Cupressinoxylon lie exposed in the walls of gullies.
They grew in the early Oligocene, some 33 to 36 million years ago, on a floodplain the sea had left behind as it retreated at the end of the Eocene. The mix of species points to a climate cooler than Mississippi's today, and some of the trees are thought to have stood 100 feet tall and lived a thousand years. Then a river tore them out and carried them south until they piled into a log jam. No stumps survive and the logs have few small limbs, both signs of a jam, and the meandering channel buried them in the sand and clay of what geologists call the Forest Hill Formation.
The stone came later, close to the surface. Sulfide minerals in nearby lignite weathered into a hyper-acidic brew around the buried wood, and silica from the surrounding sand replaced the cell walls with chalcedony and quartz. Wind-blown glacial dust, the loess, then buried the bed deeper, and only when rain cut gullies and ravines back down through it did the logs come back into the light.
Settlers knew about them by the mid-19th century, but nobody wrote them up until November 1913, when Calvin S. Brown of the University of Mississippi described the forest in Popular Science Monthly. He admitted it could not match Arizona's forests for size or colour, but thought it a fine illustration of a natural phenomenon. The state geologist E. N. Lowe judged the sands "probably Jacksonian," a Mississippi College graduate student identified the wood as fir and maple in 1958, and in 1960 Richard Randall Priddy worked out how the logs had been carried and dropped.
In August 1962 R. J. "Bob" and Shirl Schabilion bought the forty acres, conserved the logs and opened them to visitors, and within a few years the site was a National Natural Landmark.
Today a half-mile nature trail winds past the logs and a cross-sectioned sequoia trunk to the Caveman's Bench, a slab of petrified wood big enough to sit on. The museum shows petrified wood from nearly every state, with dinosaur footprints, whale bones and mastodon bones found 9 miles away, and on the rock patio a gem-mining flume lets visitors wash and screen their own mine muck and keep any gems they find.
Petrified wood
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
