Inside the cramped and dusty attic overlooking the pale green Kanawha River in the Appalachian Mountains, stacks of 100-year-old business records — deposit books, letters from customers, employee records — balanced precariously on cabinets, lined shelves and sat scattered across the wooden floor.
Siblings Nancy Bruns and Lewis Payne stumbled upon the trove of documents in 2013 after reviving the family salt business on the same farm where their ancestor William Dickinson lived and worked in the 1800s. The duo are seventh-generation descendants of Dickinson, the shrewd businessman who helped develop the region’s booming salt industry.
The documents and other items, such as photographs and vials of salt, stashed away in the attic and spread throughout the old office building, paint a picture of familial tenacity. For more than 200 years, the business evolved for survival, stretching across salt, chemical industries, land holding and banking.
Nearly 2,400 miles away, another trove of documents acquired by the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, tucked neatly into four white cardboard boxes, illuminates a different aspect of the family business — its legacy of buying, leasing and selling enslaved black people.
In the fall, the Huntington purchased two collections related to abolition and slavery in 19th century America from New York’s Swann Auction Galleries.
One collection includes a rare account of the underground railroad from Quaker abolitionist Zachariah Taylor Shugart. The other, an archive of about 2,000 corporate records, documents the history of the West Virginia salt operation Dickinson & Shrewsbury from the early 1800s to the early 1900s.
Many of the records relate to the slave labor that fueled the business and the region’s salt industry.
It includes correspondence between the two business partners in which slave labor was a constant and recurring subject, a handwritten letter from an enslaved person and inventories including the first and last names of enslaved workers owned or hired by the company. Other documents provide connections to Booker T. Washington, the post-Reconstruction era black leader, who lived near the salt company as a child.
Little is known about slavery in the salt industry, historians say. The product was essential to human life pre-refrigeration, used for preserving food, curing leather and dairy processing.
Thinking about slavery, “we tend to imagine plantations — cotton, rice, sugar, agriculture,” said Olga Tsapina, the Huntington’s curator of American history. “We don’t appreciate often how much slavery was worked into the very fabric of American society.”