An associate professor of geology at West Virginia University,* she specializes in ancient salt formations. “Native Americans were boiling brine to make salt from Kanawha Valley salt marshes long before the first commercial prospectors showed up in the late-1770s,” says Kathleen Counter Benison. Our understanding of West Virginia’s salt deposits, which come from a time when the state lay at the bottom of an ocean, is hundreds of years in the making. Indeed, the salt contained in the brine her 350-foot-deep wells carry to the surface was formed more than 420 million years ago and hails from the extinct Iapetus Ocean, a body of water that predates the Atlantic. However, the history Bruns refers to has another component-one that runs deeper than that of America, or even humanity itself. After resuscitating the brand in 2013, Bruns and her brother, Lewis Payne, became not only the last remaining salt-makers in Malden, but all of Appalachia. Dickinson’s company became one of the largest and the longest-running of them all, and was active until 1945. Dickinson rests upon has been owned by Bruns’s family for more than 200 years, ever since her four-times-great grandfather, William Dickinson, moved to the area in 1813 with aspirations of making salt. At the industry’s peak in the 1840s, it boasted 50 saltworks producing more than three million bushels of salt a year. Prior to the Civil War, the area was the largest producer of salt in the United States and known as the Kanawha Salines. “I like to reflect on that history as I prepare for my day. “I go this way because it reminds me of the area’s history,” says 51-year-old Bruns, her voice calm and measured. Just outside of the town, Bruns passes her cousin’s pastures, which are full of heritage breed Belted Galloway cattle, and turns into the gravel drive of her company, the J.Q. The road passes under Interstate 64 before dropping into the little river-fronting community of Malden. Past the city, houses thin out and rocky hills rise up on either side of the river. West Virginia & Regional History Center/ WV LibrariesĮach morning, chef-turned-salt-maker Nancy Bruns leaves her home in downtown Charleston, West Virginia, and drives southeast past the domed capitol building alongside the Kanawha River. Engraving of salt works on Kanawha River, West Virginia.
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