The Past Is Never Past: Slave Labor in the West Virginia Salt Works
James Fallows
Last week I mentioned in two posts (here and here) the revived "artisanal salt" industry that a brother and sister, Lewis Payne and Nancy Bruns, are creating on the site of the family's very successful 19th-century salt factory in the little town of Malden, West Virginia. Malden, just outside Charleston, was previously known as Kanawha Salines, after its dominant industry. Its greatest source of fame, apart from though related to the salt works, is as the boyhood home of Booker T. Washington. (More current source of fame: the football phenom Randy Moss grew up in an adjoining hamlet.)
Washington's family, who were slaves, had left a farm in Franklin County, Virginia, when they were freed by the arrival of Union troops in the spring of 1865. (I am drawing from an official narrative by Louis R. Harlan for the West Virginia Division of Culture and History.) They made their way to the Kanawha valley of the relatively new state of West Virginia, and there the 9-year-old Booker was soon put to work in the salt furnaces, where brine was boiled down to make commercial salt. From the state narrative:
Quite early one morning, Booker learned one of the reasons his stepfather had sent for him to come to Malden. He was routed from bed and he and his brother John went to work helping Wash Ferguson [his stepfather] pack the salt.
Booker T. Washington (Hampton University)
You can read much more at the official site, including the ups and downs of the salt industry in this part of the world in the years leading to the Civil War and thereafter, and of course from Washington's autobiography. In fact, here's part of what he says himself about the salt-works years:
My step-father seemed to be over careful that I should continue my work in the salt furnace until nine o'clock each day. This practice made me late at school, and often caused me to miss my lessons.
A reader in the Charleston area, Cyrus Forman, criticizes me for not including more of this slavery-and-afterwards background in my two first reports. He writes:
[Various complimentary comments about China coverage, where the reader has also lived and worked] but I just wanted to write about what I regard as a pretty serious omission to your recent article.
Noted. This was a story about entrepreneurs in a depressed area of the country in 2014, but even in the "new" country of America everything has a past, and this part of the salt industry's origin-story does deserve mention.
Now, an entirely different view on the sociology of salt. This is from an American who has lived for years in China, talking about the role in that country's and culture's past, and its complicated present. I turn it over to him:
I ran into a former student this afternoon at a cafe near my home in Beijing and the topic of salt came up unexpectedly “in two aspects” (as my students might write). [JF note: standard Chinese academic/political jargon.]
I agree entirely about the Chinese-market potential of high-end imported foodstuffs of all sorts. Our world is connected in strange and surprising ways, including via salt licks.
