PERMIAN AGE BEAVERBURK LIMESTONE: LOCATION, CHEMISTRY AND ARCHITECTURAL USES

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inauguration was highlighted by his creation of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a program that put people to work during the Great Depression. During the 1933-35 era, workers of the WPA built the facilities at the City Park in Electra, Texas. These facilities included the swimming pool, bathhouse, picnic tables, bridges, and bandstand. These structures, still in use today, were constructed using a chocolate-brown limestone known as Beaverburk, named from its outcrops along the bluffs of Beaver Creek, which extends to exposures south of Burk Burnet Ranch in western Wichita County. The limestone is found in only two other counties, Archer and Baylor. Besides the City Park structures in Electra, the only other major structures constructed with the brown limestone are the employee’s housing, storage, and maintenance buildings at the Dundee Fish Hatchery near Lake Division, south of Electra.

Other structures found in southwestern Wichita County constructed using Beaverburk include culverts, ranch entry gates, a cemetery entry way, and riprap for the bridge over Beaver Creek. Within the city of Electra, the brown limestone was used on three churches, three houses, two commercial buildings, and several elevated walls for front yards, a drainage channel, and a retaining wall for a school playground.

As early as 1912, geologists doing field studies related to the newly developed oil and gas fields in north Texas mentioned and described the Beaverburk as being Permian age. Maps and field studies during the 1920s and 30s also placed the limestone in the Wichita Group, Permian age. The Geologic Atlas of Texas (Wichita Falls/Lawton Sheet, 1987) puts the brown limestone at the base of the Waggoner Ranch formation and at the top of the Petrolia formation, Wichita Group, Permian age. The thickness of the limestone ranges up to 20 inches and no quarries or significant deposits other than thin surface layers have been found.

Petrographic and X-ray analyses indicate that the Beaverburk is a dense, fine-grained, fossiliferous, and iron-oxide rich limestone. The dark brown color varies slightly due to differences in the percentages of iron oxide. Architectural uses are generally restricted to the 1930s era construction projects.

This paper describes the geological features of the Beaverburk limestone as a unique Texas building stone.