Date: [unknown] [unknown]
Location: Kanawha Valley
Surnames/tags: West_Virginia Virginia

Contents 1 Kanawha Valley Salt Makers Project 2 Salt Making in the Kanawha Valley 2.1 Mary Ingles 2.2 Elisha Brooks 2.3 Ruffners 2.4 Kanawha Salt Company 2.5 Dickinson & Shrewsbury 3 Footnotes / Resources

Kanawha Valley Salt Makers Project

This mini-project covers the people who made salt in the Kanawha Valley of Virginia, now West Virginia, but focuses on the genealogy of the major families associated with the Kanawha Salines. The majority of this mini-project's profiles, found in Category: Kanawha Valley Salt Makers, are Ruffners, Dickinsons and Shrewsburys (who frequently married Ruffners, Dickinsons, and Shrewsburys, which can be confusing - the conflated profiles and families found in WikiTree for these folks a year or so ago was the reason for this project). While the project also works on the wives' profiles, they are usually not categorized under Category: Kanawha Valley Salt Makers, which is an occupation subcategory.

The shores of the Kanawha River were home to many salt makers who chose that line of work, and many others who did not, including captive, indentured, and enslaved peoples. From Mary (Draper) Ingles, captured by the Shawnee in 1755, to the slaves working for Dickinson and Shrewsbury prior to the firm's dissolution in 1861, hundreds of salt makers labored without profiting from the salt industry. As of this writing (March 2022), the best resource found are the records of Dickinson and Shrewsbury that were apparently bought at auction. See this webpage.^[1]

As of 12 August 2023, there is not a separate category for unwilling salt makers, just the Salt Makers category and the subcategory Kanawha Valley Salt Makers category (companion category for this mini-project).

Salt Making in the Kanawha Valley

The Kanawha Valley was known well before it became famous as the Kanawha Salines.^[2] The following sections offer a brief timeline organized primarily by Kanawha Valley salt makers/salt-making families.

Mary Ingles

The Shawnee raiding party that captured Mary (Draper) Ingles in 1755 "stopped on the way home to make salt from a brine spring on the Kanawha River"^[3] "at the mouth of Campbell's Creek", where they "set up the pots which they had stolen from Mary's house, built fires under them, filled them with briny water and directed Mary and the older captives to boil the water down."^[4]

Elisha Brooks

In 1797, "Elisha Brooks erected the first salt furnace in the Kanawha Valley at the mouth of Campbell's Creek", producing "as much as 150 bushels of salt a day".

Ruffners

In 1794, Joseph Ruffner purchased land in the Kanawha Valley from John Dickinson. The 502 acres included the famous salt spring at the mouth of Campbells Creek. "The Ruffners settled on the former Clendenin lands and leased the salt property to Elisha Brooks."^[5]

Joseph died in March 1803 and his estate, including the salt property that was destined to become the most valuable land in the Kanawha Valley, descended to his sons"^[5] - David, "Joseph, Jr., Samuel, Tobias, Daniel and Abraham. The only daughter, Eve, [had married] Nehemiah WOODS, who settled in Ohio".^[6][7]

"Of all the Ruffners, Joseph's son David (1767–1843) most strongly influenced the development of the Kanawha Valley. He and brother Joseph devised methods and tools for drilling the first salt well into the Kanawha bedrock, pioneering the industry that would produce within the Kanawha Salines up to 3.2 million bushels of salt annually."^[5]

By 1808, David and Joseph Ruffner succeeded in drilling to 59 feet, where they secured a good flow of strong brine. Also in that year, the first salt was shipped west, by river, on a log raft. A younger Ruffner brother, Tobias, suspected that a vast saline reservoir existed under the Kanawha Valley and, drilling to a depth of 410 feet, tapped an even richer brine.^[8] By 1815, up to 20 wells tapped the brine with 52 furnaces boiling it down to make that "Red Salt from Kanawha".^[9]

Kanawha Salt Company

The salt-makers of Kanawha Valley formed the first "trust" in the United States, the Kanawha Salt Company, in order to regulate the quality and price of salt and to discourage foreign competition. This cooperative helped the salt industry grow until it reached its peak in 1846, producing 3,224,786 bushels that year. At that time, the Kanawha Valley was one of the largest salt manufacturing centers in the United States.^[8]

The History of Kanawha County, published in 1876, offers the following description of salt works in Mason County, which was formed from Kanawha County in 1804:^[10]

"Along the Ohio river, in Mason County, are a number of manufacturing towns, which add much to the wealth and enterprise of the county. For a distance of perhaps five or six miles along the shore of the Ohio, opposite Pomeroy and Middleport, the tall chimneys of salt furnaces and rolling-mills blacken the air with volumes of coal smoke which constantly pour forth from their towering summits. The sound of the mechanic's hammer, the hum of the engine, and the whistle of the steamboat, all evidence the fact that there is life and vitality in that section of the State."

"Then came the fall", says Eric J. Wallace, in an article about the area's salt-making history. "In 1861, the Kanawha River flooded. The catastrophe was followed immediately by the Civil War. Crippled by back-to-back blows and competition from more efficient operations in the western United States, by the late 1800s, the Dickinson’s Malden furnace was the lone survivor of the great Kanawha salt industry."^[11]

Dickinson & Shrewsbury

One of the firms producing Kanawha Salt in the early 1800s was Dickinson & Shrewsbury, founded by William Dickinson (1772-1861) and his brother-in-law Joel Shrewsbury (1779-1859).^[1]

The Dickinson & Shrewsbury partnership was dissolved in 1861 following a lawsuit, and "John Q. Dickinson led the salt works after the war".^[1] J.Q. Dickinson & Co. continued until closing its doors in 1982.^[12]

In 2013, the brand was resurrected by the 4x-great-grandchildren of William Dickinson, co-founder of Dickinson & Shrewsbury, siblings Nancy Bruns and Lewis Payne, who thus "became not only the last remaining salt-makers in Malden, but all of Appalachia."^[11]

The website for J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works in Malden, West Virginia noted that Bruns and Payne are seventh-generation salt-makers and that their "Dickinson ancestors first drilled for brine in 1817... and established our family farm along the Kanawha River a few years after. By the 1850s, there were hundreds of wells along the river producing more than three million bushels of salt per year, making the Kanawha Valley the largest salt producing region of the United States. In 1851, "The Great Kanawha Salt" was awarded "The Best Salt in The World" at the World’s Fair in London."^[13]

When they re-established their ancestors' salt works, using one of the same wells as used by Dickinson & Shrewsbury, they developed "a unique and innovative process" for making salt from the brine: it is "completed by hand without the use of big machinery and additives."^[14]

As explained by co-owner Nancy Bruns explained in a blog post on the website for J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works:

"Our ancestors used timber, then coal, to stoke huge furnaces that evaporated the brine. They created enormous amounts of salt to supply the meat packers in Cincinnati in the early to mid-1800s. They cared less about taste and more about the preservative properties. Now, taste is more important than preservation. We developed our method to maximize mineral content, and give the salt a more complex, bold flavor."^[15]

The method they developed prompted co-owner Nancy Bruns to subtitle her blog post "We are the tortoise of the salt making world." She explained: "Many salts, usually those from northern climates, are made by burning natural gas or electricity. Salts made in southern climates often form right on the ocean shore. Since we get quite a bit of rain in West Virginia, and we don’t have a coast line, we knew we couldn’t leave it totally exposed, but we didn’t want to use heat generated by fuels. We liked the idea of our salt forming naturally so we chose to use sun-houses, basically greenhouses. We do use a few fans to circulate the air but otherwise the brine is left to the whims of Mother Nature."^[15]

Footnotes / Resources

Footnotes

1. ↑ ^{1.0 1.1 1.2} Records of the Dickinson & Shrewsbury salt works (accessed 13 March 2022).
2. ↑ "Kanawha Salines Foundation", History of Kanawha Salt (accessed 31 December 2022).
3. ↑ "Salt in Virginia", posted by Virginia Places, accessed 25 March 2022.
4. ↑ Luther F. Addington, "Captivity of Mary Draper Ingles", Historical Sketches of Southwest Virginia (Publication 3, 1967), accessed 25 March 2022.
5. ↑ ^{5.0 5.1 5.2} Ratliff, Gerald S. "Ruffner Family." e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia. 29 October 2010. (Web, accessed 14 March 2022).
6. ↑ Article by Dr. William Henry Ruffner (1876 - 1908), written in May 1901, West Virginia Historical Magazine, vol. 1, no. 3 (July 1910), p. 38
7. ↑ See also the WikiTree profiles Nehemiah Wood (1770-1824) & Eve (Ruffner) Wood (1777-1821).
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1} This information had been included without a source on the category for "Kanawha pre-Civil War Salt Makers", which was moved to a space page of the same name and accessed 13 March 2022. Both the category and the space page have since been renamed (to Kanawha Valley Salt Makers).
9. ↑ "Kanawha Salines Foundation", History of Kanawha Salt (accessed 31 December 2022).
10. ↑ George Wesley Atkinson, History of Kanawha County (West Virginia Journal, 1876). Google Books, page 3.
11. ↑ ^{11.0 11.1} Eric J. Wallace, Making Salt From an Ancient Ocean Trapped Below the Appalachians (8 January 2018; accessed 13 March 2022).
12. ↑ J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, Timeline (accessed 25 March 2022).
13. ↑ J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, Our Story (accessed 13 March 2022).
14. ↑ J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works, "Our Process" (accessed 25 March 2022).
15. ↑ ^{15.0 15.1} Blog post by Nancy, "A Method to Our Madness", 27 August 2014 (accessed 25 March 2022).

See also

• DeWitt Clinton Gallagher, Genealogical Notes of the Miller—Quarrier—Shrewsbury Dickinson—Dickenson Families and the Lewis, Ruffner, and Other Kindred Branches with Historical Incidents, etc. (Charleston, Kanawha, West Virginia : 1917), pdf link; archive.org link (accessed 22 April 2023).
• Pioneers and their Homes on the Upper Kanawha, by Ruth Woods Dayton, West Virginia Publishing Company, Charleston, West Virginia, 1947. Online: FamilySearch (accessed 24 April 2023).