When the Cape was worth its salt
A massive industry, using wind and solar, ancient yet in a way most modern
For all who welcome solar and wind as our energy future, the past proves that futuristic, breakthrough innovations can harken back centuries.
Witness the Cape Cod saltworks industry.
I burrowed into our salty history after stumbling across vast saltworks in a Sicilian town called Trapani, the most important salt port in Europe as far back as 1572. Once upon a time 40 salt lakes there produced 200,000 tons annually. With an impermeable clay base and lots of sun, Trapani’s “salinari” (salt workers) would shallow-flood big areas and let solar power evaporate away; first-level lakes are broad and blue, reducing to mid-sized red, then small ones dazzling white. Today salt production continues though much reduced, the area protected by the World Wildlife Fund as a preserve used by migratory bird species and dotted by unusual salt-tolerant plants.
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Brits were hoping to make salt here soon after the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, but lack of a clay base led to failures and the need to boil down small batches of seawater in kettles. Not until 1776 did John Sears, also known as “Sleepy John” and later “Salt John,” set out to create solar-powered saltworks of shallow vats fed by Cape Cod Bay at Quivet Neck (then the northside of Yarmouth, now Dennis).
His first efforts weren’t successful, partly because of leaks he soon caulked. Then he scavenged a bilge pump off the famous Outer Cape wreck of the British warship Somerset and moved more water. Wooden coverings to protect the vats from rain, pulled aside in sun, created a checkerboard look. Like Trapani, there were three stages advancing over weeks of evaporation, the third called “the salt room”; 350 gallons made one bushel, 80 pounds.
Salt was the crucial preservative for the essential fishing industry. One of many 40-ton vessels fishing to the West Indies used 700 bushel a year packing fish into hogshead barrels. That’s a market, and production wasn’t expensive; free seawater, unattractive land easy to appropriate along the shore, technology mostly passive (though windmills became an important power source for drawing up). Protective, patriotic tariffs enacted by the Continental Congress encouraged production.
The boom was on.
By 1802, according to Henry Kittredge’s “Cape Cod,” 136 salt makers had set up shop. By 1830, 442 Cape businesses made more than 500,000 bushel a year not counting secondary products like “Glauber” salt (apparently used to prevent hides from stiffening) and Epsom (a soak for joint ailments). According to Bob Kelley from Yarmouth -- the most knowledgeable person on the Cape about salt works history -- 90 percent of coarse salt still went to the fisheries.
Salt became the dominant shoreside industry. During apex decades two centuries ago, the 1820s and 1830s, Provincetown had 20 to 30 mills with circling arms wrapped in canvas, drawing water through hollowed logs into vats covering scores of lowland acres. So did Chatham, as this even earlier sketch shows:
By the 1840s production began to decline. Salt mines in upstate New York created competition. Bob Kelley notes that tariffs and import taxes protecting local businesses also fell away and that played a big role in the gradual demise.
A devastating storm in 1858 smashed mills and wrecked infrastructure, though salt preserved wood as well as fish; rock-hard planks were scavenged for construction. Some commercial salt production continued into the late 1880s, especially on the south side of Yarmouth near Bass River, managed by a deeply-rooted Quaker community.
This dynamic economic driver has no remnants save old photos and a replica at the Aptucxet Trading Post in Bourne – plus some boutique saltmakers for a high-end market, far from packing hundreds of thousands of pounds into fish barrels.
Yet the best words to describe an almost-forgotten, anachronistic industry are modern:
Powered by wind. Using solar energy. Sustainable.
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Too bad George Bryant never got to finish his saltworks project in ProvincetownHe told me he found a wooden intake pipe (possibly still there) buried off his property by the store (now Angel Food) and stretching way out into the harbor. He set about to replicate the saltworks that had once existed there. The windmill structure, half built stood for many years before being dismantled recently) He also told of a Provincetown saltworks windmill that was "sold" to the town of Orleans (its still there) for the price of a pound of salt. (Never paid!)
Remnants? What about streets named Saltworks,, in Brewster and orleans?