The Antebellum Kanawha Salt Business and Western Markets

by John E. Stealey

Overview

In the early nineteenth century, a ten-mile stretch along the Kanawha River in western Virginia became the largest salt-producing area in the antebellum United States. Production of this basic commodity stimulated settlement, the livestock industry, and the rise of agricultural processing, especially pork packing, in the American West. Salt extraction was then and is now a fundamental industry.
 
In his illuminating study, now available with a new preface by the author, John Stealey examines the legal basis of this industry, its labor practices, and its marketing and distribution patterns. Through technological innovation, salt producers harnessed coal and steam as well as men and animals, constructed a novel evaporative system, and invented drilling tools later employed in oil and natural gas exploration. Thus in many ways the salt industry was the precursor of the American extractive and chemical industries. Stealey's informative study is an important contribution to American economic, business, labor, and legal history.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781943665297
Publisher:	West Virginia University Press
Publication date:	09/01/2016
Series:	WEST VIRGINIA & APPALACHIA
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

John Stealey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History, Shepherd University and the author of Kanawhan Prelude to Nineteenth-Century United States Monopoly: The Virginia Combinations, Porte Crayon’s Mexico: David Hunter Strother’s Diaries in the Early Porfirian Era, 1879-1885, and West Virginia’s Civil War-Era Constitution: Loyal Revolution, Confederate Counter-Revolution and the Convention of 1872.
 

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations, Tables, Chart viii

Introduction to the New Edition ix

Acknowledgments xxi

1 Kanawha Salt's Savor 1

2 Early Development and Expansion 8

3 Growth, Chaos, and Combination, 1811-1824 17

4 Kanawha Salt's Use and Its Pre-1850 Markets 41

5 The Manufacturing Process and Technological Progress 48

6 Manufacturers and State Intervention 57

7 Merchant Capitalists, Independent Manufacturers, and Local Economic Developments, 1825-1835 76

8 Hewitt, Ruffner & Company and Depression, 1836-1846 89

9 The Kanawha Producers and the Salt Tariff 103

10 White Labor, Subsidiary Industries, and Furnace Managers 119

11 Slavery in the Kanawha Salt Industry 133

12 The Kanawha Salt Association and Ruffner, Donnally & Company, 1847-1855 158

13 Ruffner, Donnally & Company and the External Economy 170

14 Kanawha Salt Loses Its Economic Savor 184

15 Perspectives 191

Notes 199

Works Cited 239

Index 253

Editorial Reviews

"A piece of meticulous scholarship and an outstanding reconstruction, mostly from primary sources, of one of the first major manufacturing industries to develop in what is now southern West Virginia. . . .This is a well-told story of entrepreneurship, revealing how innovators in a frontier industry both anticipated and adapted to change by introducing new technologies and forms of business organization."
West Virginia History
 

From the Publisher