Salt City: The Brine That Built a Nation
Near Syracuse, New York
Picture the shore of Onondaga Lake in the summer of sixteen fifty-four. Jesuit missionary Simon Le Moyne crouches at a spring, tastes the water, and recognizes it immediately: brine. He has found a salt spring in the interior of a continent that had no other reliable domestic source of salt within hundreds of miles.
The Onondaga Nation had known about these springs for generations. They used the brine for preserving meat and fish, for medicine, for seasoning. Le Moyne's observation went into his journals and eventually into colonial memory, but the actual knowledge of the springs was never lost, it was simply encoded in a different tradition.
European commercial production started in seventeen eighty-eight, when Asa Danforth and Comfort Tyler hung a five-pail kettle from a chain over a fire at the lakeside and boiled their first batch. New York State declared the salt springs state property in seventeen ninety-seven, collecting a duty on every bushel produced.
Then came the Erie Canal, and everything accelerated. When the canal's outlet through Onondaga Lake was completed in eighteen twenty-two, it dropped the water table, causing the brine springs to flow even faster. Salt could move east to New York City and west to the frontier for a fraction of the old cost. Production surged. By the eighteen forties, Syracuse was producing nearly four million bushels a year and had become the largest salt-producing region in the United States. By eighteen seventy-two, the industry employed five thousand men and paid over eighty-six thousand dollars in annual taxes to New York State.
The state duty on salt helped fund the canal's construction. The canal made the salt profitable. It was the central economic loop of upstate New York for a half-century, brine and boats, perfectly matched.
The industry faded as competition from cheaper sources in Michigan and Ohio and the opening of western territories eroded the advantage. The last salt block on Onondaga Lake closed in the eighteen nineties. But the nickname held. Salt City is what Syracuse still puts on its license plates.
