From King Salt to King Coal,
to the World's Chemical Center

From 1808 while Thomas Jefferson was President through the 1870s, the salt works in the Kanawha Valley made this region western Virginia's most industrialized and wealthy. King Salt created a major economic power base to help move the State Capitol from Wheeling to Charleston.

The salt industry and its infrastructure led to development of West Virginia's coal, natural gas and oil industries in central West Virginia.

King Salt was dethroned by 1873 when Collis B. Huntington completed his C & O Railroad to the Ohio River near Guyandotte, creating today's City of Huntington.

But King Salt's economic legacy continues in those extractive industries and our 20th century chemical industries.

The African Zion Baptist Church was organized in the 1850s as the first black Baptist Church in western Virginia by the Wayne, Isaac, Sullivan, Johnson and other African-American families during the horror of slavery. They were respected workers in the salt industry.

As seen above, Booker's Cabin was built to match a photograph of his home, just behind the Church where Booker learned to read in Malden while a houseboy for Viola Ruffner. She taught him the social graces of the day and Booker used her strict example for his new college in Tuskegee, Alabama, where he created the first vocational college and the nation's premier black college.

In 1865, little Booker, at age 9, walked with his family 225 miles from Hale's Ford, Virginia, near Roanoke to his freedom home in Malden. Here he worked in the salt works with his stepfather and then he began work as a garden boy for the wealthy Ruffner family which encouraged his early education.

It was obvious that this special boy would become a man of substantial intelligence, energy and success. But no one could imagine he would be known at his death in 1915 as the most important leader of any race to come out of the South between the Civil War and World War I. This tribute was paid by his most noted critic, W.E.B. DuBois.

Dr. Washington's book Up From Slavery is a good fast read today. Still in print, Up From Slavery was selected third best nonfiction book written in America in the 20th Century, making him Malden's most noted author and only international figure.

Norton House is the oldest frame house in Malden.

The home was built by Moses Norton and James G. Norton. They were father and son businessmen in Malden. James' daughter Llewellyn married Robert Peel Shrewsbury of the prominent saltmaking family.

During the Civil War, Confederate and Union soldiers stayed in the home.

The first lady of the home was Mary Whitecotton Norton, wife of Moses Sr. She was an amateur astronomer.

Norton House was renovated in 1994 by Cabin Creek Quilts and its director James Thibeault, with federal and state highway grant funds. It has murals painted in 1998 by the artist Remy Cabrera showing the unique history of the home.

Fannie Norton Smith married Booker T. Washington and her connection to the Nortons here is uncertain.

One of its 20th Century residents was Mary Frances Norton. She was a school mate and best friend of the mother of Pearl S. Buck, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature for her book The Good Earth.

A granddaughter of Robert Peel Shrewsbury married John Cole, a well known civil and mining engineer who surveyed land throughout the Kanawha Valley and southern West Virginia. He designed a conveyer belt used in local mine operations. Their daughters are renowned educators living in Malden.

Martha Cole was selected State Teacher of the Year in 1980 and Llewellyn Cole is well known for her teaching of area leaders including former Governor Gaston Caperton who has attributed his success in public school to Llewellyn Cole.

The Cole sisters are local historians and they have a powderhorn used by Daniel Boone, who lived in a cave in Malden and served in the Virginia Assembly in Richmond before 1800.

Malden home of Dr. John P. Hale, a physician from Hale's Ford, Virginia, who became the area's best known salt industrialist.

He built Charleston's first elegant railroad hotel, Hale House, which burned and was replaced by the Ruffner Hotel.

In 1871, he became mayor of Charleston, succeeding Henry C. Dickinson, a founder of Kanawha Valley Bank and a Confederate War hero who was part of Malden's famous salt making family, as a descendant of Virginia Colonel John Dickinson.

Dr. Hale helped move the State Capitol from Wheeling to Charleston, and he financed the world's first brick street, constructed on Summers Street in Charleston.

The first major work on history of the Kanawha Valley was written by Dr. Hale. TransAllegheny Pioneers is devoted to the trek of his famous great grandmother, Mary Draper Ingles, upon which the best seller book Follow the River was based. It also discusses key figures and events in our history, with a very interesting time line.

Malden's Hale House was built in the Ruffner family's "Saltborough" subdivision development, now known as Old Malden, during the peak years of the salt industry.

This home is now across from "The Women's Park" which is the site of the home of Booker T. Washington's sister, Amanda Johnson.

Cabin Creek Quilts' retail outlet now is located in Dr. Hale's home, and it is open daily for tours and sales of America's finest handmade quilts. (For tours call ahead 304 925-9499)

The Old Kanawha Salines Presbyterian Church is a beautiful antebellum church, organized in 1829 by the wealthy Ruffner Family, Malden's first salt industrialists.

The current building was constructed in 1839 in the Ruffners' "Saltborough" subdivision near the Dickinson property line. It had a balcony for African-Americans, although its first minister later became an abolitionist, Dr. Henry Ruffner.

Dr. Ruffner was later President of Washington College, which was renamed Washington and Lee College, after its most famous president, retired Confederate General Robert E. Lee.

In 1847, Dr. Ruffner published a controversial pragmatic paper known as "The Ruffner Pamphlet" to advocate for abolition of the horror of slavery in America.

Worship services are held each Sunday morning at 11:00 a.m. Long poles with bags attached to the ends are used for offerings, instead of plates, as has been the custom of the Church for over 175 years.

The Wayne Cottage, now known as The Alma Lee, was the home of Minnie Wayne Cooper, a prominent African-American civic leader and educator who was a favorite of Booker T. Washington when she was a young girl.

For 82 years Mrs. Cooper lived in her 4 room cottage, until 1989.

In 1905 the property was conveyed to her respected parents by the Dickinson family. The Wayne family helped organize the African Zion Baptist Church. Mrs. Cooper's mother was Martha Sullivan Wayne and she was Amanda Johnson's best friend. She was a dignified lady who was a strict and adoring mother. Her signature look was her head scarfs and gold coin earrings, which she wore everyday.

Minnie Wayne Cooper fulfilled her parents' dreams. She became a civic leader and educator who helped integrate Kanawha County Schools without incident in the 1960s. Earlier, she was the recording secretary for the International Association of University Women at a meeting in Helsinki, Finland. She attended Wilberforce Normal School and Columbia University.

Her friend (as Ms. Cooper would always say) was Governor John D. Rockefeller IV. He awarded her the first state Washington-Carver Award for her acclaimed, lifelong civic leadership.

The 4 room cottage was wholly reconstructed in 1998 into a 2 story home. The cottage bricks were used to build the fireplace in Booker's Cabin.

Doors from the "Mother Jones Prison" in nearby Pratt were installed in this reconstructed home along with other architectural artifacts. Mother Jones' prison was a boardinghouse which was demolished in 1996. She was lodged there in 1913 after a rump Military Court convicted her of murder in the Paint Creek-Cabin Creek Mine War. Her charges and 20 year prison sentence were dismissed.

Cabin Creek Quilts has the secret trap door Mother Jones used to pass letters to the press from inside a closet under the boarding house staircase to create international outrage over the mine war and to have the United States Senate conduct hearings in Charleston about abuses before and during the mine war.

Atop the riverbank, toward the east end of Fallam Drive, a bell on a pole with a metal striker rod was used by Malden residents in the early 1900s to call the ferryman from his home across the Kanawha River, to ferry them to the southside of the Kanawha River to take a trolley train into Charleston. His home was in "South Malden" now called "Kanawha Estates" a half mile east of the K-Mart store in Kanawha City.

On their ferry and trolley trip to segregated high schools in Charleston, Minnie Wayne Cooper taught her Malden friends Latin. In 1999, a prototype bell was constructed about 100 feet east of its original location.

Area near Old Malden's commercial dock, now a pastoral scene.

The 1850 Kanawha Salines Post Office was near this area which became the dock area of Old Malden, where steamboats which would load salt barrels and unload supplies as early as the 1830s, and until the 1920s.

Also in 1850, a toll booth was nearby for the James River and Kanawha Turnpike which ran beside the river as a toll carriage trail from Tidewater Virginia through Malden and Charleston, and on to the Ohio River.

In 1898, a lock and dam system was completed on the Kanawha River, making it America's first complete river lock and dam system. This remarkable engineering feat paid for itself in the first year, opening up the rich Kanawha coalfields for a boom era of King Coal at the turn of the 20th Century.

In Malden it raised the water level above the old carriage road. Steamboats and later the C & O Railway made the toll road obsolete as an east-west thoroughfare.

In the 1920s the overland area of the old carriage trail made a comeback with national automobile travel on national U.S. Route 60, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean.

The "Midland Trail," as the national automobile route was then called, was then called was West Virginia's first official state highway.

The Midland Trail follows the general route of the James River and Kanawha Turnpike, east until it reaches Gauley Bridge where it leaves the old trail and goes up Gauley Mountain to Hawks Nest on property owned by Elkem Metals, and on to Sewell Mountain and the Greenbrier Valley.

The Midland Trail is now West Virginia's premier State Scenic Highway. For more, see www.wvmidlandtrail.com

This remarkable house museum is just east of the Belle DuPont Plant on the Kanawha River.

The Old Stone House was the home of Revolutionary War soldier Samuel Shrewsbury and his brother John who were the first settlers in Belle, coming from Bath County, Virginia in 1798.

They married daughters of Virginia Colonel John Dickinson who owned vast tracts in the Kanawha Salines. He conveyed them this property with 704 acres of land when "King Salt" boomed in Malden, the Shrewsburys and other Dickinson heirs formed the area's most profitable salt partnership.

The Shrewsbury property extended west to Burning Springs and east to Witcher Creek Bridge. The 3 story house is made of hand-cut sandstone from the nearby hillside. The stone walls are 1 ½ feet thick at the base, and 1 foot thick at the top. The handhewn walnut wood on the interior walls, cupboards and woodwork came from a nearby walnut grove. The oldest house in Belle, this magnificent home is the oldest large stone house in the Kanawha Valley.

The Old Stone House has been occupied continuously. For a number of years was used as a stagecoach inn. In 1985, it was restored by the Belle Historical Restoration Society, Inc.

A visitor may see The Old Stone House much as it was when the first Shrewsbury family lived there because its interior has been carefully restored with period pieces.

(For tour information call 949-3289)

In a nationally publicized event at the height of his national leadership for African-Americans, Booker T. Washington came to Malden by train and placed a rose at Viola Ruffner's grave to express his gratitude for her help to him in learning to read in Malden. He thereby symbolized to the world how races can live together in America through cooperation and mutual respect.

Viola Ruffner married into the Ruffner family and was known as "a very particular Yankee Lady." Her gravesite is in a small Ruffner family cemetery square near today's riverfront coal depot at Port Amherst, west of Malden. The area west of Malden was part of the Ruffner' earliest saltworks property, and Viola Ruffner's home was located on a knoll on the riverbank at the end of today's General Drive in Malden.

The cemetery can be seen in passing, from the eastbound lane of the Midland Trail just after the Campbell's Creek intersection at the northeast corner of Port Amherst.

Virginia's Chapel was built as a graduation present from salt industrialist William Tompkins to his eldest daughter, Virginia. It is memorialized in a Methodist hymn favorite, "The Old Brick Church by the Side of the Road," written by M. Homer Cummings in 1948.
The chapel is on the Midland Trail and near the Tompkins' Mansion "Cedar Grove," for which the Town was named.

In 1815, William Tompkins came to Burning Springs in the Kanawha Salines area and established himself as a major salt industrialist. He is famous today as the person to first use natural gas as an industrial fuel source. In 1842, he fired his salt furnaces with natural gas and used it to light his salt works at night, allowing for round the clock production.
He married Rachel Grant, whose brother was the father of a boy who would become a war hero and President, Ulysses S. Grant.

William Tompkins bought the property for his mansion, "Cedar Grove," from his brother-in-law Aaron Stockton, who later built today's Glen Ferris Inn.

The most beautiful riverside location on the Great Kanawha River.

The area of the mansion had been called "Boat Yard" because the Morris family established a successful flatboat construction business there. At the turn of the 19th Century, flatboats were used for one way transportation west by pioneers and early salt entrepreneurs. This was where the Kanawha River became navigable to the Ohio River.

Addie, a novel by acclaimed author Mary Lee Settle, is a wonderful account of the Tompkins' family and their history in the Kanawha Valley, as the Valley turned from King Salt to King Coal.

Virginia's Chapel and the Tompkins' Mansion are available for tours by appointment.

Virginia's Chapel is managed by the Virginia Chapel Foundation, Inc., whose officers are Roger Martin, President; Herald Prather, Vice President; Richard Tompkins, Treasurer; and Peggy Keeney Coleman, Secretary. (Call 304-595-2280)

The Tompkins' Mansion is recently restored as a bed and breakfast inn by Patty Robinson and Shirley Ellis. (For tours, call Ms. Robinson at 304 595-1184)

© 2000 Larry L. Rowe - Paid for by Larry L. Rowe