Excerpt from The Fauna of the Moorefield Shale of Arkansas

The section of Mississippian rocks in northern Arkansas includes a bed of black shale which is of considerable interest, both for the fauna it contains and the vicissitudes of nomenclature it has under gone. It is inclosed between two limestone formations known as the Boone and the Pitkin. The sections involving these formations have been especially studied at opposite ends of the line of out crop - at Batesville, in northeastern Arkansas, and at Fayetteville, in northwestern Arkansas - and it is owing to this circumstance, coupled with imperfect knowledge of the geology of the intervening area, that most of the intricacy of nomenclature has arisen.

In the Fayetteville region, between the black shale and the Boone formation, a thin and discontinuous sandstone occurs. Toward the upper limit of the shale, just below the Pitkin limestone or separated from it by shaly beds measuring up to 60 feet, there is another rather thick sandstone, which also is not persistent. Simonds, who named the formations in the Fayetteville region, called the lower sandstone the Wyman sandstone, the lower shale the Fayetteville shale, and the upper sandstone and shale the Batesville sandstone and Marshall shale, respectively, these names having been imported from the Bates ville region.

In the vicinity of. Batesville the black shale is divided about midway by a massive quartz sandstone from 30 to nearly 200 feet in thickness. The formations in this region were called by Penrose in 1891, b in ascending order, the Fayetteville shale, the Batesville sandstone, and the Marshall shale. Of these names the first was, of course, taken from the Fayetteville region, the second from Bates ville itself, and the third from Marshall, a village intermediate between Batesville and Fayetteville.

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