Largest salt producing region in the country. We are on top of a trapped ancient sea, a 600 millionyearold source. This has been dissolved by a freshwater aquifer which means it runs under us like a salty river. This was pushing up in springs and places, which is how it was discovered, mainly by large animals. Deer and elk and buffalo were here. Native americans came for hunting and gathering salt for themselves, and as european settlers moved west across Allegheny Mountains they found this valuable source of salt, which we take for granted today, how important salt was before refrigeration. The salt industry really started to grow in the early 1800s. The ruffner family, the dickinsons, really started to grow this industry. And it was an industry that grew on the backs of slaves. Valley was one of the largest industrial slave uses in the country, like many other industries. There were over slaves in the 5000 valley and 250 on the property alone. By the 1840s we were the largest salt making region of the country. Most of the salt was leaving and going to cincinnati, also called porkopolis because of the hog farming. Once the meatpacking industry started growing up in chicago, the market in cincinnati started to wane. The salt industry here really sort of started to go away. The dickinson family made salt until 1945, and we revived the business in 2013. I grew up in the valley and the salt history of our family wasnt something that was shared. I vaguely knew that we made salt at some point but i didnt know anything more. Then i started digging into the Family History when i was in my 40s and at the same time filling up my pantry at home with salt because it was so fascinating, different salts from around the world. And it was an aha moment. We decided to revive the salt industry because of several key points. We had this amazing Family History that our ancestors made salt for 160 years here, but also the movement of chefs and consumers toward really high Quality Foods made by producers they can trust. We dont add anything to our salt and we wanted to be made naturally with solar evaporation and we hand harvest it. It is a product of Mother Nature rather than the product of a machine. We are here outside. We will walk you through the salt harvesting process, which starts here at our well. It goes down 350 feet to draw the brine to the surface to fill our tanks. We pump about 7500 gallons of brine a week. It will move through our son houses. These are our Holding Tanks will where we will settle the brine. Youd we have three of them, 2500 gallons each. We need to settle the brine and then we move it into the sun houses, where it starts to evaporate. We are in the quincy sun house which is one of our three evaporating sun houses. We put the brine in these big beds where it evaporates. We take it from 4 to 15 salinity. During that time we have Calcium Carbonate precipitate out and we feed the brine off of the calcium and into crystallization. This process takes anywhere from 5, 10, to 15 days depending on the weather. We are very much at the whim of Mother Nature. We are in a building called the granary, which is what our ancestors called the building where the actual grains form or the salt crystals. We are looking at a bed here that is full of salt. We fill each of these 26 beds, with about an inch of evaporated brine down 15 salinity. We let it continue evaporating until it crystallizes, which happens at about 25 salinity, when solids form. To harvest, we use big scoops and scrapers and scrape the salt into a pile. Like this. And put it into the scoop. And then we put it into a bucket where it drains back into the for a day until we take it into our production facility, where we dry it and package it. We are in our production facility. The salt comes in here after it is drained in the granary for a day and put it in the drying room where we have the dehumidifier that pulls extra moisture off of the salt. Then it goes through a cleaning process. We go through the salt and for quality control, make sure it is 100 salt, and pull out anything that is not salt with tweezers. Just to make sure we are getting 100 salt into the jar. Our finishing salt is our flagship product. We also produce popcorn salt or cooking salt, and then grinding salt and flavored salt, West Virginia ramp salt, ramps are Wild Mountain onions. Very indigenous to West Virginia. We do an applewoodsmoke salt and also a bourbon barrel smoke salt. We are all over the country, 600 accounts nationwide, restaurants and retailers and ecommerce worldwide. That is exciting. It is a little piece of West Virginia goes everywhere. I do see us as an investor for the state of West Virginia. It was not a role given to us but i think everybody in the state is an ambassador for what we love. We love our state and we love the companies that are here. Anything we can do to lift each other up is important to me. And important to most other West Virginia producers. You can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at cspan. Org. This is American History tv only on cspan3. Scholar markistory explores the allied defense of h on the 75th anniversary of the battle of the bulge. American forces surrendered the belgian town but he argues the fighting caused a delay that frustrated the german counteroffensive. The Kansas City Public Library and u. S. Command and general Staff College held this event. Mark tonight, we will be talking about the 75th anniversary of the battle of the bulge. Tonight is also probably my farewell introduction if that ,snt a contradiction in terms for the ongoing signature series with a history Departure Department of the general Staff College. The director of the