Salt!

The other day I had some free time in my travels, so I decided to visit the famous metropolis of Saltville. My main goal there was to visit the Museum of the Middle Appalachians, which lurks in the middle of town.

Saltville, as those of you who are very quick-witted or who already read the above link might suspect, was named after the large deposits of salt in its valley. Millions of years ago Saltville was at the bottom of a small inland sea; as time went by, the sea evaporated and left behind lots of salt. The salt was caught up in various movements of the ground and ended up forming "salt veins" beneath the ground.

Wild animals like salt, so lots of migrating critters would pass through the area to get their fix. And when people arrived some 14,000 years ago, they took advantage of the abundance of critters to make lots of salted critter stew. This happy state of affairs lasted until the mid-1500's, when the Spanish sent a bunch of troops to Virginia and (being the Spanish of the time period) killed everybody in the general region. After that the Native Americans no longer settled here, declaring it sort of a giant nature reserve that was only to be used for hunting in.

So when colonists from Britain arrived in the area a century later, they found a nice big wilderness with lots of food and other resources. And the natives figured that they'd go ahead and let the silly white folks settle there if that's what they wanted. So again, everybody was happy. Until they started killing each other once more and the place was depopulated again around the time of the French and Indian War, that is, but that's only a minor detail.

Europeans found the salt deposits soon after arriving in the area; there was a good-sized salt lake in the valley, which sort of gave it away. The lake was a bit inconvenient, so it was drained. Then the salt mining began. Salt mining in Saltville wasn't done in the same way as is coal mining or gold mining. They didn't have miners chipping it out of the ground with picks and shovels. Instead, they would drill a big hole into the ground until they got well into one of the salt veins. Then they'd pump in a bunch of water. Then they'd pump out the water. Then they'd let the water evaporate. The water would have taken up a bunch of dissolved salt while underground, and so when it was evaporated it would leave the salt behind. So instead of mine shafts like in coal mines, Saltville had salt wells like oil wells. In this way, they were able to produce salt that is 99.97% pure (the other 0.03% being the remains of water bugs, I suppose).

When digging around to find the salt veins, the miners found some other interesting things as well. Animals had been coming to the big salt lake for hundreds of thousands of years at least, and naturally some of them died by or in it. Due to all of the salt, the remains were often preserved much more thoroughly than is usually the case. So the miners would dig up elephant tusks, giant cat skulls, and other fun things like that. The finds were common enough and important enough and famous enough that Thomas Jefferson was fascinated by them and kept himself appraised of the latest. Today, Saltville is still one of the major paleontological sites in North America dealing with times from the last big ice age to the present day.

The salt mining industry in Saltville grew and grew, and Saltville's importance to the country grew correspondingly. Salt is one of those vital resources, and was even more so in the days before refrigerators. It was so important for preserving food, in fact, that during the Civil War (aka "The War Between the States" or hereabouts "The War of Northern Aggression") the Confederacy devoted a disproportionate amount of effort, troops, and materiél to ring Saltville around with forts. It wasn't until the third year of the war that the US was able to get together enough force to try to take the salt mines; the first attempt was beaten off in large part by ill-trained militia armed with antique guns, which showed just how well made the fortifications were. Unfortunately, one of the US cavalry units in the fight was one of the first African-American units in the US military, and many of its soldiers who were captured or wounded were murdered by Confederate troops during and immediately after the battle (considered to be one of the worst, if not the worst, battlefield atrocities of the entire war).

A second much larger attempt was made by the US a few months later. Again they were not able to do much against the forts, but this time they at least managed to briefly get through long enough to damage the salt mines. Both sides then basically called it a victory for their own side, and the war moved on to other places.

After the war, the salt mines were repaired and it was back to business as usual. Gradually, other mineral and chemical businesses moved into the area. A British company started an alkali works in town, making Saltville one of the first towns in the US to become a major part of the world's chemical industry. Saltville also became home to one of the largest gypsum mines in the world (if your house has drywall in it that was made more than a couple decades ago, it was quite possibly made out of gypsum from Saltville), the second largest chlorine plant in the world, and what was for a long time the largest dry ice plant in the world. Saltville became a boom-town and a company town, and a world leader in the chemical industry. The hydrazine fuel that sent the Apollo astronauts to the Moon was made in Saltville.

Then the average American became aware of something called "the environment". Suddenly factories and chemical plants were seen in a new way. Saltville had actually never been all that bad of a polluter or despoiler of the land (with the exception of the locally infamous Muck Dam Disaster of the 1920's, when a holding pond in the alkali plant gave way, causing a flash-flood and chemical spill into the Holston River that killed several people and pretty much sterilised the river for years afterwards), but its prominent position in the American chemical industry singled it out for various legislations and actions. And within a few years, everything was shut down. Out of all Saltville's chemical and mining industry, only the salt mining remains. . .and that only at a small level.

And so Saltville has turned into a sleepy little mountain town again. The salt well fields are now mostly a park and golf course, and the lake is slowly returning in smaller form. No sharks as yet, it seems.

Finding the Museum of the Middle Appalachians turned out to be trickier than anticipated. The brochures and website told where to turn off the highway and which side roads to take to reach Saltville, but for the location of the museum all that they'd say was "in the middle of Saltville". Now, Saltville's not exactly New York City or London, but it does have a number of streets going off in various directions, and what with it being in a valley it is sort of long and winding. I came into town and drove down the main street looking for signs. . .and eventually found myself driving out of the other side of town. So I turned around and went back. . .and found myself back on the original side of town again. Finally I pulled into the post office parking lot and looked around on foot in the business area, and that was when I located it. It was lurking at the end of a strip of stores, looking like just one more storefront among many. The trees blocking the view of it from the main road didn't help much, either.



And yes, that is a man walking down the sidewalk pulling off his clothing. Saltville is that sort of a town. I didn't notice him until after I took the photo, and then I took great care not to notice him any further in case he continued removing clothing.

Admission to the museum is a whopping three dollars for adults, but I managed to scrape up the amount and get a brief run-down of the current front exhibit. The first room off from the lobby is given over to temporary exhibits that are set up for a month or two and then go off elsewhere. The current one is of local hand-made pottery. It seems that this location has one of the largest number of professional pottery makers in the nation, with some of them being families who have been working at the same craft since the 1700's.

Most of the things there didn't photograph well, but I did get this picture of a rather interesting doorstop that I think some people I know might appreciate:



From the roving exhibit room, visitors pass into the first of the two main rooms of the museum.



This room is mainly devoted to prehistoric times in the area, as well as geology. One rather fun exhibit right by the door is a small-scale model of the town and valley.





There are little descriptions along the side of various things such as the local river, the big fault line, the salt field, and various points of interest. When you push buttons beside the descriptions, little lights light up on the display showing the locations. They were arranged a tad strangely, though. You'd push a button at one end of the display, and the light would often be way down at the far end.

There were lots of mineral and geology displays. All along the walls of the room, near the ceiling, were sections of a 5,000-foot rock core sample with various times of interest marked. In display cases were different types of stones and gems, including an example of the official state rock:



I'll have to keep an eye out for that stuff. Another rather spiffy sample was of "small faults", rocks that had been sitting right in the middle of tiny fault lines and so ended up with parts of them getting shifted about.





You can see on those rocks where the sediments had been hardened into layers, and then where earthquakes had sort of slid half the rock out of position so that the layers are not straight any more.

The rest of the room was devoted to fossils and prehistoric human artefacts. Probably the most obvious thing in the entire room was the big mastodon skeleton in the middle of everything.





You can tell the difference between a woolly mammoth and a mastodon in at least three ways:
1) Mammoths' tusks are usually much more curved than are mastodon tusks.
2) Mastodon skulls are flatter on top
3) Mammoth teeth were sort of long flat plates with rough surfaces, while mastodon teeth were more like human molars

There were some other beasties represented as well.



The sabre-toothed cat (often called the sabre-toothed tiger, though they weren't tigers). A close relative to Abby and Marshmallow in spirit if not in biology.



The dire wolf, largest canine known to have roamed the planet. Probably nearly as ferocious as Holly, Tessa, or Molly, the Terrors of Australia.

And then there was that arch-fiend of the Ice Age, that most vicious and terrible of monsters, the dreaded giant beaver!!!!!!!









Fear its fangs of fury!

I also met a somewhat short little fellow with a spear. I decided to join him on a hunting expedition, but he was a bit too stoic and uncommunicative and I eventually decided to leave him to his own devices.



He and his friends left a goodly number of sharp pointy things sitting about, though.





And forget about any silly ol' crystal skulls, here we've got something better: the Crystal Sharp Pointy Poking Thingy and the Crystal Skull-Whacking Thingy!







The second main room of the museum was mostly human artefacts from the region's historical period. It included everything from native trinkets from the 1600's to a restaurant table from the 1980's.







Looking through this stuff is not without its perils, of course. Hazards of fiendish nature lurk around every corner, ready to flatten the unwary with bits of dead sea animal.



And here is a spherical case shot from the Civil War, something that I hadn't ever actually seen before.



This sort of shell was fired like a regular solid cannonball, but after a certain amount of time (this one had a five-second fuse) it would explode in mid-air, turning into a sort of giant shotgun shell. Probably not very pleasant to be standing near when that happened.

And here is a good illustration of the usefulness of standardisation:



That's over a hundred totally different types and sizes of bullets, all of which represent only a few of the types and sizes used at the two Battles of Saltville, which represent only a small percentage of the different types and sizes used by either army in the war. I would have absolutely hated to be in charge of supplies in those days.

There were also displays of more sharp pointy things, as well as things that go boom.





Then there were these boots, which I thought were rather interesting. They were actual boots worn by one of the officers in the war, so they're at least 145 years old. And they still look in good enough shape to wear.



Also well preserved was this document, which was written by Confederate general Robert E. Lee telling his army to basically pack up their bags and go home after their final defeat at Appomattox.



Most of the rest of the exhibits, dealing with the last century or so, were just photos and written descriptions of the various chemical plants that were built in town and what life was like during that time. There was one more rather spiffy display, though, consisting of a sort of three-dimensional map of the big gypsum mine.







Currently, the mines are shut down, filled with water, and then sealed off. So exploring them would probably be a bit tricky.

And that was the museum. I poked about in the gift shop a bit, where I bought a few odds and ends including a banjo music CD. And then I went on my way. I drove down the road a little way to a grocery store parking lot, next to which was the newly formed salt lake and beyond which was the golf course that was the salt mines. There wasn't all that much to see, though. And I didn't feel like wandering around on the golf course. So I then took my leave of Saltville, for the time being at least.