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  Texas : Features : Columns : "Letters from Central Texas"

Salt of the South

by Clay Coppedge
LOMETA - The Civil War has been called by some historians "The War Between the Salts" because salt was only slightly less important to the Union and Confederate armies than ammunition.

The Union had plenty of salt but the South did not. As a result, you might say that the North salted away the South. Or you may say nothing of the kind.

Much of the salt used by the Confederate Army was produced about eight miles south of where Lometa is now, at a place called Swenson Salines. Before that it was called Salt Creek, one of about two dozen so-named creeks in the state.

Salt was a precious commodity long before the Civil War. The City of Jericho was founded almost 10,000 years ago as a salt trading center, and the demand for salt established the earliest trade routes. Marco Polo used it like money. Homer called it a "divine substance." The English word "salary" comes from the Latin word "salarium," which was a soldier's pay in salt.

Military leaders from Napoleon to George Washington learned, often the hard way, the value of salt to an army, which was also used as a medical disinfectant; Napoleon lost many soldiers during his retreat to otherwise simple wounds because his army had run out of salt.

Salt was used in the Civil War as part of a soldier's diet and for the cavalry horses and work horses that hauled supplies and artillery. The herds of livestock necessary to feed an army also depended on salt.

"Salt is eminently contraband, because of its use in curing meats, without which armies cannot be subsisted," Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman wrote in 1862.

By 1865, when the Southern cause was all but lost, the Confederate manual had this bit of advice for its soldiers: "To keep meat from spoiling in the summer, eat it early in the spring."



The Confederate Salt Works at Lometa operated in a manner common to France and Germany but almost unheard of in the south. next page
© Clay Coppedge
"Letters from Central Texas"

July 15, 2005 column

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