The St. Peter Sandstone of the American Midwest is presented today in textbooks as a simple and unproblematic example of “layer-cake geology.” The thesis of this paper is that the very simplicity of St. Peter Sandstone has made it challenging to characterize. In widely separated states, the sandstone appeared under different names. Several theories about how it formed began to circulate. The story of the St. Peter is not only the story of the assemblage of a stratigraphic unit over a vast area during three centuries, but also the role the study of the provenance of this unit played in the development of sedimentology in the early twentieth century, research that was made all the more challenging by its “simple” mineralogy. Indeed, the St. Peter has been controversial since it was first described.

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