"The city of Cincinnati was built into a major commercial center with salt from Kanawha and pigs from Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana. By the late 1830's, Cincinnati was packing almost one third of all western American hogs...
...Kanawha salt makers could still undersell their competitors, not only because the density of their brine but because their workers were slaves.
Kanawha was in the state of Virginia, which had a huge slave-based tobacco industry that was slowly declining. The large tobacco plantations had more slaves than they could use, and the owners saw an economic opportunity in renting these people to Kanawha salt producers. According to the 1810 census, Kanawha county had 352 slaves, but by 1850, 3,140 slaves lived in the county, mostly assigned to saltworks...
Plantation slaves did not want to be leased to saltworks, and they would sometimes escape while beig taken west. The slaves knew that, like the salt, they were only a short journey to Ohio, which was a free state...
...By the 1840's, Syracuse, not Kanawha, became the leading supplier of salt in the Midwest."
