Mississippian System
Type section and use of name in Indiana: The Kenwood Sandstone was named by Butts (1915, p. 148) for exposures on Kenwood Hill in the southern part of Louisville, Ky., and was defined by him as lying between the New Providence Shale below and the Rosewood Shale above (Nancy Member of the Borden Formation of present Kentucky use). Stockdale (1931, p. 94) identified the Kenwood in Indiana and considered it as either a member or a bed of the New Providence Shale. Recent use in Indiana has been as the Kenwood Siltstone Member of the New Providence Shale (Kammer, Ausich, and Lane, 1983), but shale is the dominant lithology. Because the lithology includes siltstone as well as, shale, the unit in Indiana is called the Kenwood Member of the New Providence Shale (Rexroad and Lane, 1984).
Description: The Kenwood is an irregular elongate body about 50 miles (80 km) long that thins and pinches out westward. Its northern limit is in Floyd County. It drops stratigraphically to the west, so that a tongue of the undifferentiated New Providence intervenes between it and the overlying units (Nancy Member in Kentucky, Spickert Knob Formation in Indiana). The boundaries are conformable.
The Kenwood is generally less than 40 feet (12 m) thick, but its maximum thickness is 110 feet (34 m). The shale in the Kenwood is like that of the rest of the New Providence and is dark greenish to bluish gray and weathers to a lighter color (Kepferle, 1977). The siltstone is gray to dark gray and weathers to light gray with limonitic stains. It is generally in well-indurated, more or less planar beds ranging from 0.1 to 20 feet (0.03 to 6 m) in thickness. In places the siltstone fills channels, and there is evidence that in places it was deposited as a turbidite. Maximum siltstone content of the member is to the east (Kepferle, 1977).
Correlation: According to Butts (1915) many Kenwood fossils are also common to the Keokuk Limestone of the upper Mississippi Valley. Recent studies, for example, by Kammer, Ausich, and Lane (1983), verify correlation of the Kenwood with part of the Keokuk.
