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A happy accident led Nancy Bruns to revitalize her family’s 200-year-old West Virginia salt-making business.
Nancy Bruns, 52, grew up in the Kanawha Valley of West Virginia, just miles from the site of the former salt-making capital of the U.S. When the industry peaked in the late 1840s, the valley was home to about 50 saltworks and produced more than three million bushels of salt a year.
But by the time Bruns was coming along, that history was all but forgotten. She had no idea William Dickinson, her four-times-great grandfather, had founded what was once the largest and longest running salt-making company on the East Coast. Established in 1817, and though the J.Q Dickinson Saltworks didn’t formally close its doors until 1945, the family had long-since pivoted into other interests.
“My relatives still owned the land where the factory had been, but I don’t remember anyone ever talking about it,” says Bruns. In fact, it wasn’t until she was in her mid 40s that she discovered the legacy of William Dickinson.
“And that was more-or-less a happy accident,” she adds.
By then, Bruns was an established chef. After earning her degree from the New England Culinary Institute in Vermont, she worked for 20 years establishing herself as a staple of the gourmet food scene around Asheville, North Carolina. In the mid 2000s, she was living with her husband, Carter, in Highlands, where they owned and operated a restaurant called the Wild Thyme Gourmet.
In 2008, Carter returned to school to pursue a master’s degree in American history. Researching how trade had shaped early development in Appalachia, he happened upon a reference to the “Kanawha Salines”—that is, modern day Charleston. Fascinated, he traced the influence of Kanawha’s salt trade through the late 18th century and beyond. The quest unexpectedly arrived at his wife’s ancestors.
“It was entertaining and kind of bizarre,” says Bruns. “Here was my husband, filling me in on all this family history I knew nothing about.”
Oddly enough, the revelation seemed to validate and explain Bruns’s own peculiar interest in salt. For years she’d been visiting areas around the world to observe salt-making practices. Whether it was Greece, Africa or South America, she’d gather samples from each site into small glass bottles. At home, she proudly displayed her growing catalogue.
Containing trace minerals from millions of years ago, salt, Bruns says, is special, in that it integrates geological history to capture the flavor of a region in a way that nothing else can. Thus, the more she learned about the old “Kanawha Salines,” the more she ached to experience the historic taste of Appalachia.
