La Saline — Salt Springs That Built a Colony

About six miles south of Sainte Genevieve, an abandoned settlement called La Saline sits near a pair of natural salt springs that shaped the history of the entire Mississippi Valley. The French name means simply the saltworks, and salt, in the pre-refrigeration world, was the difference between feast and famine.

Spanish explorer Hernando de Soto sent scouts north in fifteen forty-one to bring back salt from this very area. French colonists and Illinois Indians were both harvesting the springs by the early seventeen hundreds. When French settlers crossed the Mississippi and founded Sainte Genevieve in the seventeen fifties, the salt springs at La Saline were one of their primary economic assets, used to preserve meat, cure hides, and supply trade goods across the colonial Mississippi world. Production peaked around eighteen hundred and stopped entirely by eighteen twenty-five, when industrial salt sources made the springs uneconomical. The village faded with the salt, leaving a name and a creek that still carry the memory of what drew people here in the first place.