Salt, western Virginia’s first major industry, enjoys a renaissance.


This story was originally published in the February 2025 issue of Wonderful West Virginia. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.

Written by Stan Bumgardner


Salt, our most popular food additive, livens up everything from popcorn to chili to filet mignon. But before modern refrigeration, salt was a necessity of life. Meat does not stay fresh long without refrigerating, freezing, or preserving it. Salt is nature’s preservative. By drawing water out of meat, it purges the microbes that spoil it, like a modern dehydrator making jerky.

     Prehistoric cultures salt-cured meat, especially fresh-caught fish. Salt was a lifeline for later pioneers—one properly salt-cured hog could sustain a family for a year. Settlers had to find their own salt, searching for surface outcroppings where animals gathered to lick the brine; think how many places include the word “lick” in their names. Other settlers spent the precious little money they had to buy salt, or they traded their services or possessions for it. 

     As the nation spread westward, commercial meatpackers needed much greater quantities to preserve food for the masses. Centrally located Cincinnati became a meatpacking and distribution hub. The Kanawha Valley had plenty of salt licks and was just a hop, skip, and flatboat jump up the Ohio and Kanawha rivers from “Porkopolis,” Cincinnati’s nickname. Decades before West Virginia coal ever generated electricity for Americans, western Virginia salt helped feed them.

A Discovery and Rise

Coming into Malden from Charleston, you pass by the African Zion Baptist Church, which Booker T. Washington attended as a boy in the late 1860s when he worked packing salt and mining coal. About a half-mile farther are J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works’ charming gift shop and operations, situated smack dab in the heart of what used to be some 100 individual salt-works. 

     Before the arrival of King Coal, salt was western Virginia’s first industrial king, and J.Q. Dickinson Salt-Works is an enduring vestige of the industry. Opened in 2013 by Nancy Bruns and her brother Lewis Payne, the business is one of the top domestic producers of high-end sea salt. J.Q. Dickinson received a special commendation from The Garden Club of America and has been featured in Food & Wine, bon appétit, and Taste of the South. Its salt can be bought off the shelf in shops across West Virginia, in 39 other states and Washington, D.C., and in restaurants from Brooklyn’s Chef Cava to Shepherdstown’s Alma Bea.

      J.Q. Dickinson has put West Virginia on the foodie map—and the history behind it goes back much further than 12 years. 400 to 600 billion years ago, before the movement of tectonic plates placed the continents into their current locations, the land we know as West Virginia was in the Southern Hemisphere, covered by the Iapetus Ocean, a precursor to the Atlantic. That’s why marine fossils can be found from the deepest depths of coal mines to the cliffs of Seneca Rocks. The ocean dried up over time but left the brine behind. Underground freshwater aquifers later created what Bruns calls “a salty river running through sandstone” between 300 and 1,700 feet below the surface. Unlike the salt mines of Virginia, mining Kanawha Valley’s salt required operators to drill and pump out the briny water, then evaporate it down. Another difference? Our salt was naturally rust-colored, caused when its iron content hit the atmosphere.

     Elisha Brooks dug the first salt well about a mile from Malden in 1797. How did he know where? Those surface-level salt licks were a treasure map. But he struggled drilling through bedrock to unlock the richer and more voluminous brine below. 

     The first to solve that conundrum were the Ruffner brothers from the Shenandoah Valley. Starting their operations at Malden in 1808, they were among a few dozen to make big salt money by inventing tools that were more efficient. Perhaps the most famous was “Uncle Billy” Morris’s revolutionary slip bit, which, among other salt-industry innovations, was later adapted for oil drilling.

     Salt-making resembled a petroleum operation in other ways, too—for instance, sinking massive hollowed-out sycamores into the ground as derricks to pump the water through. On the surface, in a sweltering furnace area, workers slowly stirred steaming-hot kettles until the water evaporated, leaving behind large chunks of salt. Most aspects of the work were dangerous, unpleasant, or both. As production increased, operators hired virtually anyone who would endure the conditions, turning Malden into a rough-and-tumble community known for ceaseless fights, a constant orange haze, and the sulfuric scent.

     Operators struggled to retain an adequate workforce to keep up with 24/7 production. They increasingly relied on enslaved men. Bruns emphasizes that “salt was absolutely an industry built on the backs of slaves.” On the eve of the Civil War, about one-sixth of all slaves in present-day West Virginia lived in Kanawha County; most were concentrated around Malden.

The Ruffners introduced other innovations, too. Boiling water in salt kettles required an unfathomable amount of fuel, originally timbered from the surrounding forests. Some of Bruns’ ancestors spent two years collecting wood before firing up their first furnace. By 1817, though, nearly all of the nearby trees were gone. The Ruffners, in turn, directed their attention to a harder-to-get but plentiful fuel: coal. The conditions in those mines were inconceivable. We’ll never know how many salt-working coal miners perished, but it’s significant enough that operators grew hesitant even to send their own enslaved people into those makeshift mines.

The Nation’s Salt Capital

Business success relies not just on inspiration and hard work—sometimes it also comes down to luck. Circumstances totally outside the operators’ control launched the Kanawha salt industry into the stratosphere. Only four years after the Ruffners started their works, the United States entered the War of 1812 against Great Britain, our largest salt supplier. The war abruptly cut off that supply chain, forcing meatpackers to look closer to home. 

     Almost overnight, the Kanawha Valley became the nation’s salt capital. During that 32-month conflict, the number of Malden salt furnaces increased from 16 to 52, with production quadrupling. So much money poured in and out of Malden that Virginia established a Bank of Virginia branch at Malden and finally completed the James River & Kanawha Turnpike from Richmond to Charleston, about 10 miles west. The bank soon relocated to Charleston, as did most of the wealthy salt operators, who didn’t want to live in the rowdy, malodorous town they had fostered. Instead, they built stately mansions in Charleston along the turnpike—today’s Kanawha Boulevard. Several remain, including David Ruffner’s Holly Grove (1815), the city’s oldest building. Many Charleston streets still bear salt pioneers’ names: Dickinson, McFarland, Laidley, Hale, Summers, and many more.

     Operators continually upgraded technology—for instance, trading in kettles for coal-fueled, steam-injected furnaces that heated large swimming pool–like evaporators. But despite these advances, Kanawha’s epic era of salt dominance was relatively short-lived. As the nation advanced westward, Chicago became the heart of meatpacking and sought closer sources of salt. Kanawha production peaked in 1846 at nearly 3.25 million bushels, but by the 1850s, Kanawha salt was seen as a risky investment. Even the Ruffners shut down. Then, June 1861 brought one of the worst floods ever to hit the valley—16 feet above flood stage—destroying many operations. Civil War raids wiped out most of the rest, with both armies understanding the maxim that soldiers march on their bellies as much as their feet.

     At war’s end, several operations restarted, but by the 1890s, only Dickinson was left. Bruns points out that her ancestors stayed in business until 1945 by “diversifying salt,” including its use in veterinary drugs and road dust–control projects. After that, the business didn’t produce salt but extracted raw chemicals, such as bromides, for pharmaceutical use, into the 1980s.

So Kanawha Valley salt production had been defunct for nearly 70 years when Bruns and Payne restarted the business in 2013. Bruns is a seventh-generation Kanawha Valley native who grew up where the old works were. It nagged at her knowing it was part of her family history, started by her fourth-great-grandfather William Dickinson. It helped that she had a restaurant background and saw a niche opening for rebranding salt in a new light.

     Today, J.Q. Dickinson salt is among the purest in the world. The production concept hasn’t changed much in 200 years. The briny water is still pumped from aquifers, although today it’s pumped using modern equipment and techniques that ensure purity. The producer’s giant evaporators are in greenhouses, heated by the sun instead of by wood- or coal-fired furnaces. And unlike early salt makers, Bruns’ team settles out the iron content by aerating oxygen into the mix, resulting in white salt that doesn’t have the historic red salt’s metallic taste—Bruns says her ancestors “weren’t as concerned with flavor as much as we are now.” 

     Unlike many other sea salt varieties, J.Q. Dickinson’s extremely deep wells help keep the only salt now produced in West Virginia free of contaminants and heavy metals—all thanks to modern technology, hard work, an ancient ocean, and a couple of entrepreneurial siblings who wanted to tap into 200 years of family history and produce some of the best salt in the world.

Have a Taste for More?

For more information about J.Q. Dickinson’s products, monthly farm-to-table events, the annual Salt Fest, rentals, and much more, visit www.jqdsalt.com or call 304.925.7918.