Malden, West Virginia

The small community of Malden along the Kanawha River holds one of West Virginia's most important human stories. This was Kanawha Salines, the great salt-making district, where Joseph and David Ruffner began drilling for brine around eighteen eight and built furnaces that boiled it into commercial salt. By eighteen forty, ninety furnaces here produced a million bushels of salt a year.

When the Civil War ended in eighteen sixty-five, a nine-year-old boy named Booker walked with his family roughly two hundred miles from southwestern Virginia to Malden, where his stepfather had already taken work at the salt furnaces. That boy, Booker T. Washington, spent his early years here packing salt into barrels before dawn, then worked in nearby coal mines, and eventually found his way to an education.

He went on to found Tuskegee Institute and write Up From Slavery, one of the most widely read autobiographies in American history. A replica of his boyhood cabin stands behind the African Zion Baptist Church in Malden.