Many years ago, when transportation facilities were not what they are now, New England settlers mined iron ore from the hill north of Bernardston and smelted it in local charcoal furnaces. The rocks containing the iron are creased into sharp, close folds, and they came into such close contact with a hot granite intrusive that their minerals were changed by its action. This granite, however, is older than the one which is associated with the disturbed Carboniferous beds, for it was intruded when the Devonian sediments from Gaspé to Connecticut were deformed. It was this profound disturbance that turned the red rocks of Roche Percé from a horizontal to a vertical position and raised a mountain range which stretched through all of northern New Brunswick, Maine, the lowland section of New Hampshire, and a belt extending for some miles east and west of the Connecticut Valley. The eroded remnants of these Shickshock Mountains formed the backdrop for the great Carboniferous coal swamps in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Acadia. The iron ore was a hot spring replacement of a limestone containing shells of sea organisms which lived when chordate animals first became abundant. This was the Devonian period in geologic history—the time when a backbone appeared essential in every really high-grade animal. The limestone rests upon a beach gravel, now consolidated into a quartzite conglomerate. The gravel consisted of small white quartz pebbles which came from the many veins in the steeply inclined slates of the adjacent coast. Marine deposits of Devonian age are found as far south as Leverett, and scattered outcrops indicate that the old seaway reached northward up the Connecticut, entering Canada east of Lake Memphremagog. Thence it spread eastward to Gaspé and westward to Montreal, and around the north and west side of the Adirondack Mountains into New York State. A low rolling land where the Green Mountains stand today formed the western shore of the Devonian sea for many miles northward into Quebec. The Adirondack and Taconic Mountains were a fused aggregate of undulating uplands which limited the seaway on the south along the International Boundary. Its eastern shore lay far beyond the horizon of the region described in this brief account.