West Virginia's Salt Springs

This story originally appeared in Issue No. 01 of Southlands. You can escape your screen and dive into a print version of the story by ordering a copy in our shop. And be sure to subscribe to receive the next two issues.

Though now landlocked, West Virginia wasn’t always so dry. Several hundred million years ago, ancient oceans flowed over much of the northeastern U.S. What we know today as West Virginia was underwater, between two lost continents. 

This fact accounts for the state’s rich deposits of natural resources like coal, oil, and natural gas: the remnants of tiny creatures that lived in these shallow seas were turned over millions of years into hydrocarbons. But these seas also gave us a lesser-known hallmark of the Mountain State: a store of salt, a culinary essential that was at one time quite challenging to source. It’s a resource that has shaped the story of not just West Virginia, but the entire country—and the ancient salt springs are still being tapped today. 

What West Virginia has, technically, is salt brine, highly salinated water that is trapped underground. That makes production simple: you can boil it down and use what’s left over on your food. Indigenous peoples have been using such salt from West Virginia’s salt springs for thousands of years—for flavoring, especially, but also for medicine and rituals. Salt was a valuable commodity for trade, too, which is how this good would continue to leave its mark on the South.