Campbell's Choice | Big Stone Gap Publishing

In 1817 coal was first used to evaporate salt at the Kanawha Salt Works. It rapidly resolved the bottleneck that the use of wood caused. By 1846 the Kanawha Salt Company was making 3,224,786 bushels a year.

There was one problem with the salt made at the Kanawha site. The salt was tainted by compounds of iron, which gave it a brown color and a slightly bitter taste. It was a very distinctive attribute, and the salt from this location was known far and wide as ‘Kanawha Brown (or ‘Red’) Salt’. However, most of the per capita salt usage was not in cooking, but in other uses such as leather tanning, mixing the chinking mud used to fill the space between the logs in a log cabin, and for live stock usage. And for the cost differential, many people chose to put up with a little bitterness in their table salt.

In 1846 Sarah Buchanan Campbell Preston died, and willed her estates to her three sons. The sod had not settled over her grave at Aspenvale when her sons in 1847 began trying to turn their interests in the Saltville operations into cash. None of them seemed to have been interested in actual management of the business. By 1858 they were bankrupt. George Palmer and William Alexander Stuart began to try to buy up the different fragments of ownership. * The issue wound up in court, and 1873 saw it in the Circuit Court of the United Stated for the Western District of Virginia. This decision was appealed to the Federal Supreme Court in 1877. A significant reality that determined the result of this suite was that the Preston family had been too derelict to register some legal documents. Thus ended the era that had begun a century and a quarter earlier when Maj. Charles Campbell committed his share in the Patton Loyal Company expedition into Campbell’s Choice.

* Spencer, Ackerman & Co. leased the salt works in 1858, and sold out to Stuart, Palmer, and George Parker in 1862.

1850 List of Thomas Preston's 56 Slaves Used at the Salt Works

... Continue to SALTVILLE IN THE CIVIL WAR

CAMPBELL'S CHOICE	Page
INTRODUCTION	1
SALTVILLE GEOLOGY	1
SALTVILLE INDIANS	4
LEGAL MECHANISMS OF LAND TITLE OWNERSHIP IN VA.	6
THE SETTLEMENT OF SALTVILLE	13
INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION AROUND SALTVILLE BETWEEN THE PIONEER PERIOD AND THE CIVIL WAR	27
SALTVILLE IN THE CIVIL WAR	31
AFTER THE WAR	47
A MODERN CHEMICAL FACTORY	52
EPILOGUE	57
BIBLIOGRAPHY	61
INDEX	66

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