The Salt Beneath Seneca Lake

The industry that gave Watkins Glen its first real economic foundation was not grapes or gasoline. It was salt. In the year eighteen eighty two, workers employed by the Watkins Oil Well Company were drilling beside Seneca Lake when they struck something unexpected.

Instead of petroleum, they found thick salt brine, a dense solution of dissolved salt lying deep beneath the lake and the surrounding land. The deposit was the remnant of an ancient inland sea that covered this part of North America more than three hundred million years ago. As that sea evaporated over millions of years, it left behind vast reserves of salt locked into the bedrock.

The Finger Lakes region, including the Seneca Lake basin, sits above one of the largest salt deposits on the continent. The Glen Salt Company opened the first commercial salt operation in Schuyler County in eighteen eighty three, on the western shore of Seneca Lake. The Watkins Salt Company followed in eighteen ninety eight, operated for decades by the Clute family, and eventually grew into one of the largest independent salt companies in the United States.

In nineteen seventy six the Clute family sold Watkins Salt to Cargill, the agricultural and food corporation. By then the salt wells had been operating for nearly a century, long outlasting the early dreams of an oil industry that never materialized on these shores.