Palestine Salt Works C. S. A.
Palestine, Anderson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
Located 6.5 miles southwest. During the Civil War this salt works was assigned to produce salt for the Confederacy at a fixed price of eight dollars for a hundred-pound sack. Private customers from East Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana often paid twenty dollars for a sack. Producing salt was slow, tedious work. Salt water was taken from wells spread over a distance of three-fourths of a mile. A pump operated by a slave was placed in each well. Gum logs, hollowed out and joined together formed a pipeline from the wells to large cast iron boiling kettles which were kept fired. Heated water was then transferred to smaller kettles for quick evaporation. (see other side) (Back Palestine Salt Works)
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
During the Civil War salt was a strategic necessity—for preserving meat and feeding armies—and this works labored to supply the Confederacy at a fixed price, though desperate private buyers often paid far more. Enslaved workers pumped brine from a line of wells through hollowed-gum-log pipelines to great iron kettles, where it was slowly boiled down into salt.
Why it matters
Salt shortages plagued the wartime South, and works like this reveal both the improvised industry and the enslaved labor that sustained the Confederate war effort.
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Related events
- · Civil War
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Texas Civil War Iron Works
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In 1863 the Chapel Hill Manufacturing Co. built an ironworks on this site to make farm and kitchen tools the Confederacy badly needed, smelting native East Texas iron ore with Cherokee limestone and charcoal from nearby hardwoods. A crew that included 100 enslaved workers from Louisiana fed ore down the hillside into the furnaces, where molten iron was cast into molds. By the 1880s at least sixteen ironworks operated across East Texas.
Site of McKnight Plaza
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After James B. McKnight ran a saddlery and farrier shop on this Palestine block in the late 1800s, the property passed in 1910 to the Farmers and Citizens Bank, founded by African American businessmen in 1906. For the next 35 years the block—known as McKnight Plaza and fondly called "on the square"—thrived as the commercial heart of Palestine's Black community, packed with the offices of doctors, dentists, druggists, cafés, barbers, and a funeral home. Its social life centered on the Missouri Pacific Colored Booster Club, which sponsored dances and events until the building was razed in 1945.
Jemison Quarters Cemetery
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Settlers from Tennessee and Alabama founded Tennessee Colony in 1847, and around 1850 Elbert S. Jemison established a plantation here, working enslaved people on his own cotton fields and renting their labor to neighbors and the nearby Confederate salt works. After emancipation in 1865, many freed people stayed, establishing this cemetery where—by tradition—both former enslavers and the formerly enslaved lie buried. Generations of African American residents, including veterans of the twentieth century's wars, rest here still.
Governor Thomas Mitchell Campbell
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Born near Rusk in 1856, Thomas Mitchell Campbell worked his way through his education, became a lawyer, and rose to manage the International & Great Northern Railroad from Palestine. With no prior office, he won the governorship in 1906—rallying crowds to "The Campbells Are Coming"—and became Texas's second native-born governor after his boyhood friend James S. Hogg. His two terms brought anti-trust laws, a pure food act, and prison reform before he returned to law and banking.