We walked about a mile to the salt springs. The old original one, formerly used by the Indians, and another lately opened, are on the west side of Salt Lick {144} creek and are owned by a family of the name of Beal. Three others on the east side of the creek, opened within three years, belong to a Mr. Greenup. The salt is made in three furnaces at Beal’s springs, and in four at Greenup’s. Each furnace contains fifty cast iron pans, of about twenty gallons each, and makes, on Greenup’s side, one hundred bushels of salt per week, while on Beal’s side they make only sixty bushels per week, in each furnace. The price of salt at the works is two dollars per bushel. A furnace requires eight men to do its work, whose wages are from twenty to twenty-five dollars per month each. The water in the old spring is near the surface, but the new wells are sunk to the depth of fifty-five feet. The water is wound up by hand by a windlass, in buckets, and emptied into wooden troughs, which lead to the furnaces. The old spring has two pumps in it. Much labour might be saved by machinery wrought either by horses, or by the water of the neighbouring creek; but in so new a country one must not expect to find the arts in perfection.
The proprietors of each furnace pay a yearly rent of from three to five hundred bushels of salt to the proprietors of the soil.
The valley in which the springs are is small, and surrounded by broken and rather barren hills, but producing wood enough to supply the furnaces with fuel constantly, if properly managed.
There is a wagon road of seventy miles from hence to Lexington, through a country settled the whole way. The road passes the upper Blue Licks, where are also salt springs and furnaces, not nearly however so productive as these. The Salt Lick springs, which are the strongest in this western country, are not half so strongly impregnated with salt, as the water of the ocean, yielding only about one pound of salt, from sixty pounds of water.
{145} What a subject of admiration does it not afford to the moralizing philosopher, that such a provision should be made by all bountiful nature, or rather by nature’s God, for supplying both the intellectual and brute creation, with an article so necessary to both, in the heart of an immense continent, so remote from any ocean.
There are three or four houses at the landing, which was intended as the scite of the county town, but the seat of the courts has been established four miles lower down the Ohio.[111]
We breakfasted on good coffee, biscuit, meat and cheese, at the house of one M’Bride, an Irishman, who has a fine family of ten children all living.
FOOTNOTES:
[109] For the early history of the Scioto, see Croghan’s Journals, vol. i of this series, p. 134, note 102.—Ed.
[110] Major John Belli was a cosmopolitan, his father being French, his mother Dutch, and he himself born (1760) and educated in England. He inherited estates in Holland, but having become imbued with republican principles, emigrated to America, bearing letters of recommendation from John Jay. Belli landed at Alexandria, Virginia, in 1783 and remained there nine years, forming a personal acquaintance with Washington, Knox, and other public men. Sent west on public business in 1791, he remained as deputy-quartermaster of the army until after Wayne’s victory, when he purchased land at the mouth of Turkey Creek, and built thereon the house of which Cuming speaks. It was a large two story frame building, unusually good for the region, and was named “Belvidere.” Major Belli married a cousin of General Harrison, and although the founder of Alexandria at the mouth of the Scioto, preferred his home at Turkey Creek, where he died in 1809.—Ed.