Not only did the New Yorkers now have more efficient transportation, but, borrowing Cape Cod ideas, they also made their salt more efficiently.
The Salt Springs are in the towns of Liverpool, Salina, and Syracuse in the county of Onondaga. . . . The works which we had an opportunity of examining in Syracuse, are constructed upon the plan of the works upon the Cape and on our own coasts and beaches—open and extensive vats, covered at night and during the rainy and wet weather. But evaporation is hastened by boiling the water in large kettles constructed on purpose, in Liverpool and Salina. Wood is abundant and so cheap, that the expense is very trifling, the water is drawn up by horse and steam power, and it is estimated that 90 gallons of water will make one bushel of salt, so perfectly is the water saturated with salt.—Barnstable Patriot, September 4, 1830
The New York saltworks used Cape Cod–style rolling roofs. Apparently, something about these roofs was great fun. In both Cape Cod and Syracuse, families were constantly complaining about their young sons slipping away to the saltworks and wearing out their pants sliding down the roofs and crawling between the vats. Childhood memoirs contain detailed descriptions of the saltworks as playgrounds, with acres of vats dripping stalactites of white, amber, and rust red.
Half of an 1890 stereo card of the Onondaga saltworks showing salt being raked from solar evaporation vats with rolling roofs of a design copied from the Cape Cod saltworks. Onondaga County Salt Museum, Liverpool, New York
As the New York saltworks prospered, with salt vats taking up more and more acres, it became more difficult to roll back all the roofs in the face of a sudden downpour. Watchtowers were built with warning bells. If the rain watchers saw dark clouds, they rang the bells and hundreds of workmen and their families immediately ran to push the covers over the vats.
The workers lived in villages close around the saltworks so they could be near the vats when the bells rang. Then entire families ran to the saltworks, competing with each other to be first to cover a complete row. Winning families got small cash prizes.
Many of the New York salt workers were Irish. The Irish soaked both potatoes and corn in brine. Salt potatoes, new potatoes cooked in brine much the same as were made by the salt workers in Guérande, are still a specialty of Syracuse.
Salina was an important center with hundreds of saltworks and several hundred homes. Syracuse, chosen as the best route for canals, had been an undeveloped swampy lowland. Colonel William L. Stone, passing through in 1820 when the Syracuse population was 250 people, wrote, “It was so desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it.”
The Erie Canal ran west to east, and the Oswego Canal, which connected the Erie Canal to Lake Ontario, ran north to south. The two intersected in the center of the town of Syracuse. With its torch-lit bridges over reflecting canals, Syracuse became known as the “American Venice.” Once Syracuse became Venice, Salina was reduced to a suburb. Syracuse was now, like the Italian Venice, a salt port, where Onondaga salt was loaded onto Erie Canal barges. By the time the full canal was opened, only five years after the town was said to sadden stray owls, Syracuse had tripled its population, and by 1850, 22,000 people lived there.
Not only did New York have a Venice, it had a Liverpool, the town being named so that Onondaga salt could be shipped around the United States with that trusted old brand name “Liverpool salt.”
AFTER THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, a debate had begun about where to locate the capital of the new country. Virginians, arguing for the Potomac, made the outlandish claim that this Virginia river, which empties into Chesapeake Bay, also connected with the Ohio. This would have made the Potomac America’s central waterway, since the Ohio cuts through the Midwest and enters the Mississippi. It was a Virginia propaganda ploy, and no such river connecting the mid-Atlantic to the Mississippi exists. However, Virginia did have a river that, while it never reaches the Atlantic, connected Virginia to the Ohio River. In the western part of the state, today West Virginia, the Great Kanawha River begins and flows into the Ohio, carrying goods and people to Cincinnati and Louisville. As Americans moved west across the Appalachians, this was one of the major routes. The river trade and migration turned the frontier town of Charleston, West Virginia, into a trading center. Pivotal to this trade and even more pivotal to the economic development of the Midwest was a ten-mile stretch of the Kanawha that produced salt.
On the northern bank of the Great Kanawha was a huge salt lick known as the Great Buffalo Lick. The first Europeans in the area noted indigenous people making salt at the lick and also noted the many wide trails made by buffalo and deer to this place. In fact, it was animals, not so-called trailblazers such as Daniel Boone, that had carved the original trail across the Allegheny Mountains to the Ohio River Valley.
In 1769, when Daniel Boone followed that trail, crossing the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky, he took with him Kanawha salt, as did the thousands of other settlers that followed. In 1797, a man named Elisha Brooks leased land on the lick and sank the hollowed trunks of three sycamore trees ten feet into the ground. The three pipes served as wells. Using twenty-four kettles to evaporate the brine by burning almost five cords of wood, Brooks produced three bushels in a day. A decade later, the Ruffners, a family of inventive salt prospectors, made a new kind of drill by fitting an iron rod into a tapered wooden tube. A heavy wooden block was repeatedly raised and dropped on the rod, driving it into the ground, with the tube as a guide. But after seventeen feet, having reached solid rock, the rod would go no deeper. They then tried fitting a metal chisel to the rod, and the repeated pounding into the rock below slowly drilled a hole. This was considered a great innovation in drilling at the time, although the Sichuan Chinese had been doing the same thing since the twelfth century. In 1807, the Kanawha salt makers even invented a tube with a valve on the bottom to extract brine in the same way the Chinese had been doing it for 700 years.
By 1809, with these new inventions, Kanawha was experiencing a boom. Some fifty Kanawha salt producers had made their small riverfront the most important salt region in the United States after the Onondaga region. New holes were being drilled, and new boiling houses were being built. Most of the salt producers at Kanawha were short-term, small-scale operators who saw an opportunity to become wealthy in only a few years. In 1815, when fifty-five furnaces were operating, the largest producer had four. Most were single-furnace operations burning local coal.
The War of 1812 created the Kanawha saltworks’ best years. With no Liverpool salt and shortages everywhere, the number of furnaces increased in the three years of war from sixteen to fifty-two.
When you merely want to corn meat, you have nothing to do but to rub in salt plentifully and let it set in the cellar a day or two. The navel end of the brisket is one of the best pieces for corning.
A six pound piece of corned beef should boil three full hours. Put it in to boil when the water is cold. If you boil it in a small pot, it is well to change the water, when it has boiled an hour and a half; the fresh water should boil before the half-cooked meat is put in again.—Lydia Maria Child, The American Frugal Housewife, 1829
THE GREAT OPPORTUNITY for Kanawha salt came with the postwar midwestern pork and beef industries. Because Kanawha salt could move inexpensively down the Ohio River, midwestern farmers produced tremendous quantities of pigs and cattle—especially pigs—and took them to the waterfront to be delivered to the river ports of Louisville and Cincinnati. There the meat was salt-cured and shipped throughout the settled parts of North America. Like the salt from the brine springs of Salies-de-Béarn, Kanawha salt was highly soluble and fast penetrating, ideally suited for curing meat.
The city of Cincinnati was built into a major commercial center with salt from Kanawha and pigs from Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. By the late 1830s, Cincinnati was packing almost one third of all western American hogs—more than 100,000 hogs per year. Other centers on the Ohio such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Madison, Indiana, also prospered.
Kanawha served
this midwestern market with little competition. Unlike the French and the Spanish, English settlers and their American descendants tended to bring salt with them rather than find it where they went. In a market-driven society, a distant but efficient saltworks with good transportation seemed a more practical solution than a nearby but inefficient saltworks. As Americans moved west, they shipped salt from the East, just as the settlers in the East had shipped it from England.
Indiana, Illinois, and Kentucky saltworks, many of them adapted by the French from the saltworks of indigenous people, had weaker brine than Kanawha and used wood rather than coal. This made Kanawha salt far cheaper to produce. In fact, even at outrageously inflated prices, Kanawha salt makers could still undersell their competitors, not only because of the density of their brine but because their workers were slaves.
A wood engraving of a slave working in a Virginia saltworks. The Granger Collection
Kanawha was in the state of Virginia, which had a huge slave-based tobacco industry that was slowly declining. The large tobacco plantations had more slaves than they could use, and the owners saw an economic opportunity in renting these people to Kanawha salt producers. According to the 1810 census, Kanawha county had 352 slaves, but by 1850, 3,140 slaves lived in the county, mostly assigned to saltworks.
By law the saltworks could only require slaves to work six days a week, but this law was seldom enforced. The best job for a slave at the saltworks was barrel maker. The salt was shipped in barrels, and slaves were expected to make seven barrels a day. Sometimes owners who rented their slaves would negotiate better terms such as only six barrels being required a day. The worst job in the salt-works, and one almost exclusively done by slaves, was coal mining. Slave owners would sometimes stipulate that their slaves were not to be used as coal miners, arguing that it was a misuse of their valuable property. Coal miners were often maimed or killed in cave-ins. The saltworks themselves were also dangerous, especially for slaves who were not trained in this industry. Boilers exploded, and sometimes workers would slip into near-boiling pots of brine. The owners sometimes sued the salt makers to be compensated for the loss or damage of their human property.
Plantation slaves did not want to be leased to saltworks, and they would sometimes escape while being taken west. The slaves knew that, like the salt, they were only a short journey to Ohio, which was a free state. Many slaves escaped by land or water, and salt makers would hire men to go to Ohio and bring them back. Once steamboats appeared, runaways increased, in part because of the transportation the boats afforded and in part because the boats hired free blacks who would encourage escape. Even the slaves who worked on the boats clearly lived a better life than the slaves in Kanawha.
In January 1835, Judge Lewis Summers complained, “There seems to be some restlessness among the slaves of the salt works and I thought more uneasiness in relation to that species of property than usual.”
ROBERT FULTON DID not invent the steamboat, though he did build one of the first submarines, The Nautilus, which the French, British, and American governments all rejected. Fulton’s enduring fame comes from a steamboat he launched in New York harbor in 1807 that sailed the Hudson. Numerous earlier steamboats had been built, and in 1790, John Fitch had established the first steamboat service, ferrying passengers between Philadelphia and Trenton. But such experiments were all commercial failures. Robert Fulton’s Hudson River boat made money and demonstrated for the first time the commercial viability of steam-powered, flat-bottom, paddle-wheel-propelled riverboats.
These boats created Kanawha’s first real competition. By the 1820s, steamboats for the first time made Liverpool salt accessible in the U.S. interior because they had enough power to carry a heavy salt load upriver against the strong currents of western waterways. The British liked to carry salt as ballast for their cotton trade with New Orleans, and they landed Liverpool, Turks, and Salt Cay salt there. The new steamboats carried foreign salt up the Mississippi River system, including the Ohio. The shallow-hulled steamboats could even navigate past the falls of the Ohio at Louisville, which had previously excluded Madison and Cincinnati from Mississippi traffic.
While this was happening, the Erie Canal opened, providing Syracuse with a western waterway. Before the Erie Canal, Onondaga salt had to be carried by pack mule to Lake Erie. The New York salt was preferred by many because, as with French bay salt, the slow solar evaporation process produced a desirable coarse grain. But because of slavery and ample nearby coalfields for fuel, Kanawha salt was cheaper.
No sooner was the Erie Canal opened than other canal projects were proposed. The first one was started in 1832: a 334-mile artificial waterway called the Trans-Ohio Canal, from the Ohio River to Cleveland on Lake Erie. Salt was the only bulk commodity transported on the Trans-Ohio Canal. By 1845, canals also connected Onondaga salt to the Wabash in Indiana.
The Erie Canal offered a refund on tolls to New York State salt producers if they used the canal to carry salt out of state. In trade on the Great Lakes, salt became ballast where empty ships had previously been weighted with sand. Sometimes they would carry the salt for free. By the 1840s, Syracuse, not Kanawha, became the leading supplier of salt in the Midwest.
IN THE 1840S, the Kanawha salt makers received another blow. The protective tariffs against imported salt designed to stimulate domestic salt production after the Revolution were angering westerners because they raised the price of salt. In their view, by taxing imported salt, the government was allowing domestic producers to overcharge. Kanawha, in particular, was the salt producer singled out for this accusation.
In 1840, Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton delivered a speech in the U.S. Senate comparing Kanawha salt makers to the British East India Company, a despised instrument of British colonialism, the economic system that Americans had fought two wars against.
The tax on foreign salt, by tending to diminish its importation, and by throwing what was imported at its only seaport, New Orleans, into the hands of regraters, this tax was the parent and handmaiden of a monopoly of salt, which, for the extent of territory over which it operated, the number of people whom it oppressed, and the variety and enormity of its oppressions, had no parallel on earth, except among the Hindoos, in Eastern Asia, under the iron despotism of the British East India Company. . . . The American monopolizers operate by the moneyed power, and with the aid of banks. They borrow money and rent the salt wells to lie idle; they pay owners of the wells not to work them; they pay other owners not to open new wells. Thus, among us, they suppress the production, by preventing the manufacture of salt.—Thomas Hart Benton, U.S. Senate, April 22, 1840
Among the opponents of Senator Benton in the Senate was the delegation from Massachusetts, which desperately wanted to preserve the tariffs. But by the end of the decade the tariffs were removed, and not only Kanawha but also Cape Cod could no longer compete.
By 1849, when Henry David Thoreau visited the Cape, he was already writing about saltworks being broken up and sold for lumber. Those boards, used to build storage sheds, were still leaching salt crystals 100 years later. By then the Cape Cod salt industry was long vanished.
Kanawha survived. Soon the country would be divided into North and South, and it would become apparent that a southern saltworks was an important and all too rare asset.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The War Between the Salts
IN THE 1939 classic film of the Civil War, Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler sneered at southern boasts of imminent victory, pointing out that not a single cannon was made in the entire South. But the lack of an arms industry was not the only strategic shortcoming of the South. It also did not make enough salt.
In 1858, the principal salt states of the South—Virginia, Kentucky, Florida, and Texas—produced 2,365,000 bushels of salt, while New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania produced 12,000,000 bushels.
By 1860, the United States had become a huge salt consumer, Americans using far more salt per capita than Europeans. Numerous saltw
orks had sprung up in the North. Onondaga, the leading salt supplier, reached its peak production during the Civil War. The 200 acres of vats in 1829 had expanded to 6,000 acres by 1862, when it employed 3,000 workers and produced more than 9 million bushels of salt.
The United States as a whole was still dependent on foreign salt, but most of those imports went to the South. The imports from England and the British Caribbean were landed in the port of New Orleans. One quarter of all English salt entering the United States came through New Orleans. From 1857 to 1860, 350 tons of British salt were unloaded in New Orleans every day, ballast for the cotton trade.
As generals from George Washington to Napoléon discovered, war without salt is a desperate situation. In Napoléon’s retreat from Russia, thousands died from minor wounds because the army lacked salt for disinfectants. Salt was needed not only for medicine and for the daily ration of a soldier’s diet but also to maintain the horses of a cavalry, and the workhorses that hauled supplies and artillery, and herds of livestock to feed the men.
Salt was always on the ration list for the Confederate soldier. In 1864, a soldier received as a monthly allowance ten pounds of bacon, twenty-six pounds of coarse meal, seven pounds of flour or hard biscuit, three pounds of rice, one and a half pounds of salt—with vegetables in season. But the Confederate ration list was in reality a wish list that was only occasionally realized.
The Union army generally had ample supplies, and its rations included salt, salt pork, occasionally bacon, and both fresh and salted beef. Here too reality did not quite live up to the ration list. The salt beef, of which a Union soldier was issued one pound, four ounces per day, was greenish in color and unlovingly nicknamed by the troops “salt-horse.” John Billings, a Union veteran, writing about the rations after the war, mentioned numerous unpalatable recipes such as ashcake, which was cabbage stuffed with salted cornmeal and water and baked in ashes.
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