GALLATIN COUNTY. 215 



drainage of the salt crystals, but all were glad to receive it as soon as 

 it was cool enough to handle, and to start off with their pack horses 

 loaded with sacks of salt from which the water trickled as they jour- 

 neyed home. The fuel required to evaporate such an immense amount 

 of water, stripped the country of timber for miles around, and the 

 expedient was resorted to of conveying the brine for miles in wooden 

 pipes, to the rapidly receding forest. The idea never once occurred to 

 these early salt-makers that the five-foot bed of coal through which 

 their wells generally were dug, could furnish, ready at hand, a never- 

 failing supply of the best and cheapest fuel. 



After the establishment of salt works on the Kanawha river, in Vir- 

 ginia, and at Pomeroy, in Ohio, the Saline mines could no longer profit- 

 ably compete in the market; therefore, the works were finally aban- 

 doned and every vestige of former prosperity was effaced by the rava- 

 ging hand of time, and all efforts to revive the manufacture of salt on 

 the Saline, river, until recently, proved a ruinous loss to the parties 

 engaged in it. 



About the year 1850 the Saline property was purchased by Messrs. 

 Temple & Castles, the present proprietors, who soon thereafter com- 

 menced to bore a new and deeper well. The first brine was struck in 

 this well at 108 feet; at 600 feet a cavity with some gravel was passed, 

 and at 1,100 feet the bore stopped in brine which marks 7.2° of Baume's 

 saltometer, and requires only seventy -five gallons to make a bushel 

 (fifty pounds) of salt, which is fully as strong as the brine of the 

 Kanawha. The well is not artesian, but the brine comes within a few 

 feet of the surface and is pumped. Messrs. Temple & Castles were not 

 present wheu this well was bored, and no farther record was made of 

 the rocks passed through, except noting a five-foot bed of coal at forty 

 feet below the surface. This coal outcrops in the river at Equality, also 

 in the hills one mile to the west ; and being referable to coal No. 5 of 

 the general section, it serves to establish a starting point, by means of 

 which the horizon of the saline reservoir in the rocks below may be 

 determined with a tolerable degree of accuracy.' The first briue at 108 

 feet is probably in the shales overlaying the sandstone above coal No. 4 ; 

 the cavity with gravel at 000 feet is about the place of the shale divi- 

 ding the Conglomerate in two members, as seen at the Battery Bock 

 and elsewhere, while the 1,100 feet may stop in the Chester limestone, 

 which therefore, forms the base of the muriatiferous rocks in this part 

 of the State. It is my opinion, also, that the strong brine has its main 

 lodgment in this limestone — finding its way upward by hydrostatic 

 pressure through permeable strata — and that it is more or less reduced 

 in strength by the fresh water which it encounters on the way. 



