A Book about Salt, and a Field Trip to Friendship

 

I read a very interesting book about salt the other day:

Salt: A World History covers the history of human production, transportation, and consumption of salt, from the first evidence of its processing and usage to today. Because salt is ubiquitous today, in most places easily accessed and cheap (you can get free packets of iodized salt in fast food restaurants--the Ancient Chinese would have flipped!!!), it completely blew my mind to learn that once upon a time the ability to access and process salt defined where you could live, and that the production and transportation of salt once upon a time made and broke the fortunes of nations. It's an unnoticed component of a lot of world history and human geography, and makes a lot about the world make more sense.

Like words! Ancient Roman soldiers at one point were paid in salt (which had an AWESOME resale value!), so that's where the world "salary" comes from, and also the phrase, "worth his salt." They salted their raw veggies before they ate them, so that's where the word "salad" comes from. 

That chapter right there is where the book hooked me. Y'all know how I feel about etymology!

And then I got completely invested in how ancient sources of salt were discovered and processed, and then improved with technology, and then, like as not, taken over by the government. 

Like the Salt March. Here's me showing off my ignorance, but how did I watch that entire Ben Kingsley movie as a little kid and yet still I knew nothing about the Salt March? Helped Will with her entire AP European History class (and she got a terrific score on the exam!), and still I knew nothing about the Salt March! In Colonial India, the government tried to monopolize salt production (thereby raising the prices, taxing it, shutting the former owners and laborers of saltworks out of their businesses, etc.) and forbade citizens from collecting their own salt, even though it was readily available, historically an activity that everyone did, formed these big crusts on the beaches and was LITERALLY RIGHT THERE. Gandhi's peaceful protest started by simply walking to the beach and... picking up salt.

In contrast with how they messed up India by putting artificial restrictions on salt production and trade, England messed itself up by having basically no restrictions on its own salt production for centuries, during which salt was a super lucrative commodity. In England, "wich" was a suffix given to places where there was production activity or trade, so many of the places in England with names like Norwich and Greenwich had saltworks. Whole families would be out there constantly pulling up brine from springs and boiling it in pans, never taking a break or letting the kids go to school because that would eat up their profits. They burned coal to evaporate the water, so the atmosphere was toxic, and much of the salt that was produced was put on ships to West Africa... where it was traded for captured Africans, who were then taken in those ships to North America and sold into slavery.

England just really, really sucked for a while, didn't it?

In the late 1800s, mysterious sinkholes begin to develop all over Cheshire County, where you couldn't throw a rock without hitting someone who'd dug a well and was pumping up brine and evaporating it. The sinkholes could emerge anywhere, and destroyed streets and houses and fields. There was no way of predicting where they'd show up next. But they did eventually figure out what was causing them. Apparently the entire county was underlaid with rock salt, and the brine that everyone was pumping up was groundwater that had dissolved some of this salt. When they pumped up the brine, more groundwater replaced it, and then that groundwater dissolved more salt until it, too, reached maximum solubility. Then it, too, got pumped out, until there were just vast open spaces underground that couldn't support the earth above it and collapsed.

And that's just one example of people messing up the land. Not specifically salt focused, but salt adjacent, is how Israel built a canal to siphon water from the Sea of Galilee, which flows into the Jordan, which Jordan also siphons water from, so that so little water finally makes it to the Dead Sea that it's growing ever saltier and ever smaller and if you ever want to see it while it still exists you should probably go ASAP.

Other interesting facts: iodized salt is politicized in many places (side note: I wonder if I should consume more iodine?), the bodies of LITERAL CELTS were found in Austria in a prehistoric salt mine, adding to my list of places that I really must visit, and former salt mines make excellent bunkers for precious artifacts and nuclear waste, because the openings that you make into the vault will recrystalize and seal the vault up as if it had originally grown that way.

After I finished this book, I OBVIOUSLY Googled "saltworks near me." You never know--maybe there's a cool old salt mine somewhere near! Maybe it has a slide!!!

I didn't find any salt mines with slides within driving distance, alas, but I DID find that a nearby creek is aptly named, and that in the 1800s after the state was snookered away from the Miami, settlers pumped brine out of springs and evaporated it to create salt. Some more digging informed me that sometimes they'd go door to door and sell the salt by the cupful to individual households. 

So, I really REALLY wanted to see if I could find any evidence of these historic saltworks, but the problem is that the entire Salt Creek Valley was actually dammed in the 1960s to make the lake that we now use for drinking water. Salt Creek feeds into it from the north and flows out of it from the south, but there's no way that I can figure to find out if any of these old brine wells are still above water. 

Nevertheless, there's definitely some old stuff over there on the north side of the lake, stuff that I've never wandered around to look at before, so on an overcast late afternoon recently, Matt and Will agreed to come check it out with me.

This is supposed to be a marsh, but I guess only seasonally? The Corps of Engineers manages it, but I couldn't figure out if it was always a marsh, or only since the valley was flooded:

This is the cemetery of Friendship, Indiana, which was created by a guy who figured that his saltworks were so successful that there should be a whole town around it. I don't think anyone ever actually lived in Friendship, but the stones of this cemetery are all from the 1800s, when the town was trying to be established:

It's interesting to contrast it with the Mt. Ebal Cemetery, which seems to have been most active a little later and is still well-kept and visible. This cemetery is just a little clearing in the woods, accessed by dirt road, overgrown and old and fascinating:

It's limestone country, of course, so many of the stones are limestone, easy to identify by how they've weathered:

The spiky plant growing around almost all of the stones is yucca, which is not native to Indiana but was super popular to plant around homesteads and in cemeteries. I absolutely covet a yucca of my own:

Because this cemetery is mostly undisturbed, I guess, I also thought it was interesting to be able to see clear differences in the ground over where I assume the burials are. The ground is slightly indented, and there's a different groundcover just in those spots. It reminded me of that Irish henge that was discovered because of very slight differences in the composition of the soil from the ancient rotted posts:

And as always, there are examples of beautiful stone carving:

There's pretty much always someone who's grubbing around looking for frogs and cicada shells instead of gazing at historic stone carvings, as well. Tell me you spent the day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on without telling me that you spent your day working in a stable without your heavy gloves on, sigh:

This one has a creepy poem!

And this one I didn't see until I tripped on it:

Afterwards, we drove around tiny backroads for a while (I think I found the iron bridge referenced in that article on the history of the local saltworks!), stopping to look at the pretty things--

Matt and Will report that the zoo they visited in Lima, Peru, had an exhibit of white-tailed deer.

--then we hiked down a gated road to see where Google Maps had geotagged the Friendship Church.

Found it! Or, rather, we found what's left of it...

So, no brine springs or saltworks, but a great old cemetery, hundreds of thousands of black-eyed susans, some zoo-worthy white-tailed deer, and a very interesting and decrepit staircase. 

And a VERY interesting book about salt!