Salt (38 page)

The canal was built in sections, and each was put into service upon its completion. The first section to be completed was the ninety-eight miles from Utica to the Seneca River, the section that ran through the salt-producing region. A weigh station to assess barge loads, designed to look like a Grecian waterside temple, was built in the tiny, backwoods stopover of Syracuse.

In October 1825, the last section of the canal was completed, and Governor Clinton and other notables went to Buffalo to board the boats of a flotilla making the inaugural voyage to New York City. The lead vessel was the
Seneca Chief,
which carried a portrait of Clinton in Roman toga by a distinguished lithographer of the day. Among the notables joining Clinton on board was Joshua Forman. The vessel was provisioned with symbolic items, including two kegs of Lake Erie water to be poured into the Atlantic off Sandy Hook, some whitefish, a canoe made by Lake Superior tribesmen, and potash from the saltworks.

The Erie Canal was 363 miles long. Like most famous bridges and waterways, it occasionally attracted unhappy romantics wishing to leap to their death. But when they hit Clinton’s ditch, they were shocked to discover that, with limited funding, the state had only been able to afford to dig the canal four feet deep.

T
HE CANAL HAD
opened at a prosperous time for American salt. In 1837, Cape Cod alone had 658 salt companies producing more than 26,000 tons per year. But Cape Cod lost its competitive advantage once upstate New York had its own waterway to New York City.

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.”

A
FTER 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

T
HE 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.