Raise your glass to the hard working people

Lets drink to the uncounted heads

Lets think of the wavering millions

Who need leaders but get gamblers instead

Lets drink to the hard working people

Lets drink to the lowly of birth

Raise your glass to the good and the evil

Lets drink to the salt of the earth

(M. Jagger/ K. Richards) 

THE CIVIL WAR SALT MAKERS OF ST. ANDREWS BAY: THE SALT OF THE EARTH

The story of the Civil War in Florida is one long drawn out drama characterized by deprivation and tragedy. Less than a month after secession and two months before the war even started, the New York Times reported massive inflation in Florida and that the price of slaves had dropped by one half in the past six months. Small town businesses were already closing and poor people were going hungry. 

On Friday, April 19, 1861, only one week after the first shell was fired on Ft. Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln issued a "Proclamation of Blockade Against Southern Ports". By June, the blockade had already begun at Apalachicola and September saw the first naval action of the Civil War occur in Pensacola harbor. From the very beginning of this awful war, anyone who thought they could sail out of St. Andrews Bay in their sloop or schooner in hopes of going fishing or engaging in the coastal trade was in for a rude awakening. The Civil War came to Northwest Florida coast right from the very get-go.

You know there's a lot of truth to that old expression,"You don't know what you got 'til it's gone."
How many times have you heard someone exclaim, "I can't imagine living down here in the summer without AC!" Well, imagine living down here without refrigeration as well. There was one main way to preserve food in 1861 and that was with salt and President Lincoln's naval blockade had an immediate impact on salt. The people of Florida at the time of the Civil War probably used more salt per capita than any group of people who have ever walked on the face of the earth. No one worried about extracting it from seawater. That was too much trouble. Hell, you could get a 200 pound sack for just about nothing on the docks at Apalach. It came over as ballast from the European ships loading cotton. You may not have been keeping up with the news in 1862 but suddenly you noticed something truly strange and unusual. There was no salt.

It got really, really bad in a world without salt. No one realized how valuable and vital salt was until it was gone.Salt served as preservative, disinfectant, seasoning and fertilizer. When it got to be hog killing time in the autumn of 1862, there was no reason to kill the hogs because you couldn't cure the meat. The Confederacy started making wooden soles for canvas shoes because without salt no one could tan leather. Livestock suffered. Without salt, the Confederate army couldn't make disinfectant to clean the wounds of the injured.

Suddenly a new industry designed to extract salt from sea water popped up on the shallow, secluded shores of St. Andrews Bay. By 1862, hundreds of salt works dotted the landscape from Phillips Inlet all the way to California Bayou in East Bay. The Confederate government exempted salt workers from conscription so St. Andrews Bay suddenly had a huge influx of draft dodgers and in a world at war even the draft dodger had to prove he was "worth his salt." The only way you could keep your draft exemption was to produce over 1000 pounds of salt a day. You had everything from "Mom and Pop" operations with a single kettle to huge factories over a hundred feet long with a hundred kettles boiling 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Pretty soon as many as 2500 men were out in the salt marsh digging brine wells, chopping wood, stoking fires, dipping boiling brine and making salt in the St. Andrews Bay area and 4000 wagons pulled by teams of mules and oxen were employed in moving the product north to Eufaula so the railroad could transport it to Montgomery and from there to a salt hungry Confederacy.

It didn't take long for the Gulf Blockading Squadron headquartered at Pensacola's Ft. Pickens to target this wartime industry for destruction. Many of these military missions are described in the official military records and the record reveals that St. Andrews Bay experienced repeated amphibious search and destroy missions from the U.S. Navy's sailors and marines from September of 1862 until February of 1865.  The blockading squadron made up mainly of gunboats constructed from sidewheel steamers and bark rigged clipper ships built their naval blockade station, barracks, wharf, refugee camp, prison and cemetery on Hurricane Island, the barrier island that once existed at the mouth of the channel entering St. Andrews Bay. John A. Burgess in his 1986 book, SAND IN MY SHOES, uses a  June 1985 Panama City News-Herald column by Marlene Womack and concludes from her information that by 1934 all traces of Hurricane Island disappeared underneath the waters of the Gulf but that during the Civil War the island existed "in the open channel approximately one mile east south-east of the present day land's end (the eastern tip of today's Sand Island)." In 2013, the former land's end of Shell Island would now be a portion of Tyndall Beach. 

The purpose of this article is not to chronicle the merciless and persistent destruction which the salt makers of St. Andrews Bay experienced from the U.S. Navy but to describe the industrial plants which the Union was unable to exterminate and which, like the mythical Phoenix, arose from the ashes as fast as the navy could demolish them.

Thanks to an aging matron from Tallahassee who decided to publish her Civil War diaries in 1925, we have a contemporary description of one of the small "Mom and Pop" operations which was built on Apalachee Bay east of St. Andrews. For our purposes this diary entry best captures life at a typical single syrup kettle Gulf Coast salt works. 

October 27th, 1863.—We went to the salt works today and, though I am tired and dirty and have no good place to write, I am going to try to tell you about it.

A year ago salt began to get scarce but the people only had to economize in its use, but soon there was no salt and then Father got Cousin Joe Bradford to come down from Georgia and take charge of some salt works he was having installed on the coast. He had plenty of hands from the plantation but they had to have an intelligent head and then, too, it is a rather dangerous place to work, for the Yankee gunboats can get very near the coast and they may try shelling the works.

Though they have been in operation quite awhile this is my first visit. Father brought us with him and we will stay three days, so he can see just how they are getting on. We are to sleep in a tent, on a ticking filled with pine straw. It will be a novel experience.

I am so interested in seeing the salt made from the water. The great big sugar kettles are filled full of water and fires made beneath the kettles. They are a long time heating up and then they boil merrily. Ben and Tup and Sam keep the fires going, for they must not cool down the least little bit. A white foam comes at first and then the dirtiest scum you ever saw bubbles and dances over the surface, as the water boils away it seems to get thicker and thicker, at last only a wet mass of what looks like sand remains. This they spread on smooth oaken planks to dry. In bright weather the sun does the rest of the work of evaporation, but if the weather is bad fires are made just outside of a long, low shelter, where the planks are placed on blocks of wood. The shelter keeps off the rain and the fires give out heat enough to carry on the evaporation. The salt finished in fair weather is much whiter and nicer in every way than that dried in bad weather, but this dark salt is used to salt meat or to pickle pork. I think it is fine of Father to do all this. It is very troublesome and it takes nine men to do the work, besides Cousin Joe’s time; and Father does not get any pay whatever for the salt he makes.

We expected to have a grand time swimming and fishing. We are both good swimmers, but Father and Cousin Joe will not allow us to go outside of this little cove. Yankee gun-boats have been sighted once lately and there is no knowing when the salt works may be attacked.

Even though we may not have a picture of the Confederate government salt works on St. Andrews Bay, the largest in the entire state of Florida, we do have a Harper’s Weekly engraving of a large salt works near Port St. Joe that was attacked by the U.S.S. Kingfisher in September of 1862. From this image along with descriptions of large salt works of the time, we may gain an idea of how what was called the salt block was constructed. Like an old time wood stove, the works had oven doors with a fi re box at one end and a chimney at the other. This created a draft that drew the fl ame, heat and smoke to the chimney and heated the double row of iron kettles, basins or tanks that rested on open- ings in the masonry foundation. Old steamboat and sawmill boilers, coastal channel buoys and anything else made of iron that could be split into reservoirs for brine along with syrup kettles were mounted in a double line along the brick and limestone rock foundation of the structure. A white saline vapor rose from the boilers and was professed to be a cure for respiratory diseases but this was dangerous work. Sleeping in tents located in a mosquito infested salt marsh, constant one hundred degree temperatures, boiling brine and blazing ovens have their hazards. Huge ladles were used to dip the crystallizing salt out of the cooling brine and it was placed in split oak or wicker baskets hung above the boilers to drain. The salt was then thrown onto oak boards on the fl oor of sheds built on both sides along the entire length of the furnace. The kettles boiled down about three times every 24 hours and work went on day and night for about a week when the entire operation had to be shut down for a clean out of the incrust- ed scale called pan stone that accumulated on the bottom of the pans and interfered with the transmission of heat. This was considered the worst job in the entire process.

The heart and soul of the operation was the reservoir of brine which fed the entire salt works. This is the part we know little about. The pumps, gutters, pipes and aqueducts used to supply the salt block are a mystery as well as the reservoir, basin or well that was the source of the brine. On the Bon Secour River in Alabama, brine wells were dug above the reach of the high tide. These 12 foot by 12 foot pits were about 10 feet deep and were built like inverted pyramids with the sides made of squared logs narrowing down to the bottom which prevented the pit from fi lling in with sand. The brine seeped in through the loosely placed timbers and, brine being heavier than the fresh water, it sank to the bottom of the pit. On St. Andrews Bay, basins may have been built where the brine was allowed to stand for a few days and concentrated before being pumped or dumped into the iron tanks of the salt block.

Ella Lonn, a Goucher College professor from Baltimore, who wrote the classic book, SALT AS A FACTOR IN THE CONFEDERACY, stated about St. Andrews Bay, “Nowhere perhaps was a greater persistence manifested than in St. Andrews Bay in rebuilding the works so continually destroyed by the Federal fleet. It is diffi cult to explain whence the Richmond authorities found the means and as- sembled the materials for this really remarkable feat.”

Professor Lonn also does a great job of describing how the scarcity of this commodity condensed into a microcosm all the frustrations of the Confederacy and gave rise to this early St. Andrews enterprise,” It is only when a prime necessity thrusts itself upon public attention by its absence that a person ceases to take it for granted. Only when he no longer has it, does he realize what an important ingredient for his palate and digestion is plain, ordinary salt, necessary alike for man and beast.”