National Register Listing

Old Salt Works

SE of Southard, Southard, OK

The old Salt Works is significant because of the role it played in the early settlement of Blaine County, Oklahoma and the industrial development of the region. The waters of Salt Creek are so ladened with salt that until just recent times dry salt on the edges of the water might accumulate to the depth of eight to ten inches. Southern Plains Indians utilized the deposits exclusively until the 1840s and 1850s when both white and red entrepreneurs gathered the salt for trade purposes. The most notable of the latter was Jesse Chisholm, a trader of Cherokee extraction for whom the famous cattle trail was later named. Systematic exploitation of the resource, however, awaited the opening of the Cheyenne-Arapaho Indian Reservation for white settlement in 1892 and the inclusion of the region into Oklahoma Territory.

In 1894 Jeff Saunders, an ex-cattle trail driver, designed and built the two large steel vats known as the old Salt Works. Where the pans were manufactured is unknown, but it is certain that Saunders had them shipped by rail to Oklahoma, probably Kingfisher, on the newly constructed Rock Island Railroad. From there he took them by wagon some thirty miles to the northwest, up Salt Creek, to the rugged terrain of their present location. Once in place, the works produced some 4,000 pounds of salt in ten hours. Saunders sold the product twenty-five cents per 100 pounds to local people and at $1 to $1.25 to more distant customers to pay for shipping. The founder of the old Salt Works, however, did not establish a successful business for himself, for his own facilities were too small and too inaccessible. But, however, he did pioneer a new industry.

Some four miles down stream from Saunders works on level ground and next to a new railroad track other entrepreneurs in 1901 established the community of Salton, later known as Ferguson Constructed at that location were two impressive salt plants, one of which was owned by the nationally known Morton Salt Company. The industry, attracting national capitol when Oklahoma was still a Territory, thrived for more than a decade. The old Salt Works, therefore, constituted the first systematic attempt in western Oklahoma to distill salt for profit and as such symbolizes the early settlement and industrial development of Blaine County, the region, and the state.

(Today there are no traces of the two facilities established at Ferguson).

Local significance of the site:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1983.