1871.7 513 (Lesley. 
pathy with the Holston River. This accounts for the inexhaustible supply of 
liquid. The heaviest pumping has no perceptible effect in lowering the level. 
In 1853 the salt yield was 300,000 bushels; 50 Ibs. to the bushel, and 6 bush- 
els to the barrel ; at 50 cents a bushel. Five furnaces were then running 
24,000 gallons of brine pumped daily ; 10,000 cords of wood burned yearly. 
During the Civil War, four wells were pumped night and day for six 
months, and yielded 1,000,000 bushels of salt during that half year. 
There were then sixty-nine different ‘‘ blocks of kettles”? going. These 
kettles, broken and rusty, lie scattered about the valley for six miles, 
half buried in piles of burnt and broken down walls which represent the 
various works then in full operation. Some of the salt water was carried 
in railway tanks nine miles to Glade Spring Station on the Virginia and 
Tennessee Railroad, and boiled there. 
At present there are three ‘‘blocks,’’ of 80 kettles each, (5 bushel to a 
kettle) per 24 hours, making 360,000 bushels per year, of 800 days. 
Preston’s gypsum banks yielded 2000 tons in 1854; the cost at the 
mines, in lump, being $3, and in flour $5; eighty miles distant $20. 
What the yield has been since and what it is now, I do not know. Ope- 
rations are vigorously carried on at four or five shafts. Plaster is now 
sold at the mines for $2.50 the ton; at Sharon Alum Springs, 35 miles to 
the eastward, at $10, in wagons; and is carried forty miles further east 
for use upon the soil. Its virtues are well known and highly prized. It 
doubles the grass crop and grain, and greatly improves corn. One bushel 
of 100 pounds is sown to the acre. 
A railway from Saltville east would find a market for all the plaster it 
carried. Plaster would go east to the Wolf Creek Fork Junction, and re- 
turn by the other line to be used on the pasture lands of Tazewell and 
Russell and Wise Counties. But its greatest commercial outlet would be 
towards Staunton and Winchester. 
Although the gypsum rocks have not the regularity of a coal bed, and 
some difficulties, of a kind peculiar to this district will be encountered 
when mining operations are extended to cope with the demands of com- 
merce along a great trunk railroad, yet I see no practical limit to the 
eapacity of the gypsum belt for exploration. Shafts five and six hun- 
dred feet deep have permitted the miners to feel the gypsum masses for 
fifty yards in width. Such a mass, limited by such a shaft, weighs six or 
seven hundred thousand tons, provided the gypsum be solid the entire 
depth of the shaft, &c., &c. This is not the case ; neither, on the other 
hand, is the width of the column of gypsum limited to fifty yards, or to 
any other figure. Nothing can be more irregular than the masses of gyp- 
sum underground—unless it be the course to be taken to get it out to the 
surface. In spite of all mining difficulties the value and scarcity of 
the mineral in all other parts of the country must make its mining in this 
district always extremely profitable, and its railway carriage over long dis- 
ances inevitable. It must always be in demand; can always pay a high 
freight charge, and cannot meet with competition from the Nova Scotia 
plaster until it arrives within a hundred miles or so of tidewater. Westward 
and southward it may go five hundred miles without meeting competition. 
