Case Study 6.1: Salt Works and Enslaved Labor in the Kanawha Valley

How the Mountains' Largest Industry Ran on the Labor of Enslaved People

The Kanawha Valley cuts through the heart of present-day West Virginia, a broad river valley where the Kanawha River — formed by the confluence of the New and Gauley Rivers at Gauley Bridge — flows northwest toward the Ohio. It is green country, hemmed in by forested ridges, and in the early nineteenth century it was the site of one of the most important industrial operations in the trans-Appalachian West.

It was also the site of one of the largest concentrations of enslaved industrial labor in the United States.

This case study examines the Kanawha Valley salt industry: how it operated, who did the work, and what the industry reveals about the relationship between slavery and industrialization in Appalachian history.

The Industry: Salt from Brine

Natural brine springs — places where saltwater from deep underground seeps to the surface — had been known in the Kanawha Valley for millennia. Indigenous peoples had visited the springs, and so had the animals that gave the springs their common name: licks. The first European settlers recognized the commercial potential almost immediately. Salt was an essential commodity in the early republic — used for preserving meat, curing hides, and as a basic dietary necessity in a society without refrigeration. It was heavy and expensive to transport, which meant that local production was economically viable anywhere brine could be found.

The Kanawha salt industry began in earnest around 1800, when entrepreneurs began drilling wells to reach the brine deposits beneath the valley floor. The technology was straightforward but labor-intensive. A well was drilled using a spring-pole rig — a simple mechanism that dropped a heavy bit into the earth, powered by the elasticity of a bent pole. When the well reached the brine layer — sometimes hundreds of feet down — the saltwater was pumped to the surface using hand pumps or, later, steam-powered pumps.

The brine was then evaporated in large iron kettles or, eventually, in long, shallow pans heated by furnaces. The furnaces consumed enormous quantities of fuel — first wood, then coal as the forests were depleted. The salt crystallized as the water evaporated, was raked out, dried, packed into barrels, and shipped down the Kanawha and Ohio Rivers to markets throughout the West.

By the 1820s, the Kanawha Valley was producing over three million bushels of salt annually, making it one of the most productive salt-making regions in the country. By the 1840s, production had declined somewhat as competition from other regions (notably the salt deposits of upstate New York) cut into the Kanawha market, but the industry remained significant through the Civil War.

The Labor Force: Enslaved and Hired

The salt works required a large, year-round labor force. The wells had to be maintained. The pumps had to operate continuously. The furnaces had to be fired around the clock during the evaporation process — a single interruption could ruin an entire batch. Timber had to be cut, coal had to be mined, barrels had to be made, salt had to be packed and shipped.

The salt producers turned to enslaved labor.

Some salt-making families owned enslaved people outright. The Ruffner family, one of the earliest and most prominent salt-making dynasties in the valley, owned dozens of enslaved workers who operated their salt furnaces. The Shrewsbury, Donnally, and Lewis families — other major salt producers — likewise relied on enslaved labor.

But the majority of the enslaved workforce at the salt works came through the hiring system. Every January, salt producers negotiated annual hiring contracts with slaveholders from across the region — not just from the Kanawha Valley itself, but from the Shenandoah Valley, the Greenbrier Valley, and even from counties as far away as eastern Virginia. Slaveholders who had more enslaved people than they needed on their farms — or who simply wanted the cash income — hired out their enslaved workers to the salt producers for an annual fee.

The hiring contracts specified the terms: the hirer would pay a set annual rate (typically ranging from $75 to $200, depending on the worker's age, sex, and skills), provide food, clothing, and shelter, and return the worker at the end of the year. Medical care was theoretically the hirer's responsibility, but in practice it was often inadequate. If an enslaved person died during the hiring period, the legal question of who bore the financial loss — the owner or the hirer — was a frequent subject of litigation.

The scale was substantial. At the height of the industry, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 enslaved workers labored at the Kanawha salt works in a given year — making the salt works one of the largest employers of enslaved labor outside the plantation districts. The workforce included men, women, and children. Men typically performed the heaviest labor — drilling, pumping, hauling fuel, working the furnaces. Women and children performed supporting tasks — cooking for the workforce, packing salt, tending gardens that supplemented the workers' rations.

The Experience of the Workers

What was it like to be an enslaved worker at the Kanawha salt works?

The physical conditions were grueling. The furnace work was hot, exhausting, and dangerous. Workers tended fires that burned continuously, raking salt from the evaporation pans in searing heat. Burns were common. The wells were dangerous — equipment failures, collapses, and gas pockets posed constant risks. The timber-cutting and coal-mining operations that supplied fuel to the furnaces were hazardous in their own right.

The social conditions were shaped by the hiring system. Hired workers were separated from their families for most of the year. A man hired to the salt works from a farm in the Shenandoah Valley might not see his wife and children from January to December. If his owner decided to hire him to a different operation the following year — or to sell him outright — the separation could become permanent. Hannah Jones's WPA narrative, quoted in this chapter's main text, captures this annual cycle of separation: "Every January they'd come and take him."

The living conditions varied by operation but were generally poor. Hired workers were housed in dormitory-like structures near the salt works — crude log buildings that provided shelter but little comfort. Food was basic: cornmeal, salt pork, and whatever could be grown in small gardens. The workers were under the supervision of overseers — sometimes hired white men, sometimes enslaved men who had been placed in supervisory roles — who enforced the pace of work and reported to the salt producers.

But the salt works also created opportunities for a limited form of autonomy. Some workers were assigned to tasks that required skill and judgment — managing the evaporation process, maintaining the wells, operating the pumps — and skilled workers were more valuable, which gave them a marginal degree of leverage. Some salt producers allowed workers to perform extra tasks after their assigned work was complete, paying small sums for "overwork." These payments were tiny — pennies per day — but over time, some workers accumulated enough to purchase small luxuries, to maintain connections with distant family members, or, in rare cases, to begin saving toward self-purchase.

Booker T. Washington: A Salt Works Childhood

One of the most famous Americans of the nineteenth century spent his early childhood at the Kanawha salt works. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery around 1856 in Franklin County, Virginia, was brought to the Kanawha Valley by his family after emancipation. His stepfather, Washington Ferguson, had been hired to the salt works before the war, and the family settled in Malden, a salt-making community near Charleston.

In his autobiography, Up from Slavery (1901), Washington described the salt works:

"My stepfather had already secured a job at a salt-furnace, and he had also secured a little cabin for us to live in... The first thing I ever learned in the way of book-learning was while working in the salt-furnace. Each salt-packer was assigned a certain number, and that number was placed upon each of his barrels. I soon learned the figure '18,' which was the number assigned to my stepfather."

Washington's account — learning to read numbers from the barrels of salt, growing up in the shadow of the furnaces, surrounded by formerly enslaved people who had spent their lives in the industry — is a reminder that the Kanawha salt works were not an abstraction. They were a place where real people lived, worked, suffered, and, eventually, claimed their freedom. The industry that had run on enslaved labor continued after emancipation with free Black workers, many of whom stayed in the valley and formed communities that persist to this day.

The Salt Works and the "No Slavery" Myth

The Kanawha Valley salt industry is perhaps the single most devastating piece of evidence against the myth that "there was no slavery in Appalachia." The industry was located in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains — in the same West Virginia counties that are often cited as the epitome of "poor white" mountain culture. It employed thousands of enslaved workers. It was one of the most economically significant industries in the region. And it was completely dependent on enslaved labor.

If there was no slavery in Appalachia, what were 3,000 enslaved people doing at the Kanawha salt works?

The question answers itself. The myth is not merely inaccurate. It is incompatible with the most basic facts of the region's economic history. The mountains had industry. The industry had enslaved workers. The enslaved workers were Black. They were there.

Questions for Discussion

1. The salt works used the hiring system to acquire most of their enslaved labor force. How did the hiring system differ from outright ownership in terms of the incentives it created for the hirer? Why might the hiring system have led to worse treatment of enslaved workers in some cases?

2. Booker T. Washington's Up from Slavery is one of the most widely read American autobiographies. How does knowing about the Kanawha salt works' reliance on enslaved labor change your reading of Washington's childhood descriptions? What continuities do you see between the enslaved workforce and the free Black community that Washington describes after emancipation?

3. The chapter argues that the Kanawha salt works demolish the "no slavery in Appalachia" myth. What do you think explains why this evidence — which has been available in census records and industrial records for over 150 years — has not been more widely known? What does the persistence of the myth, in the face of this evidence, tell us about how historical narratives are constructed and maintained?

4. Compare the Kanawha salt works to a plantation cotton operation in the Deep South. What are the similarities and differences in terms of the organization of labor, the living conditions of the workers, and the economic relationship between the workers and the product they produced?