🍎 Jackson, Ohio: Where It All Started | Historic Walking Tour Part 3

The most important place in Jackson County has no sign, no parking lot, and Google Maps puts it in the wrong spot. Part 3 leaves downtown and goes to the ground that made the town — the salt licks on Salt Lick Creek — then out to a charcoal blast furnace where two hundred men were paid in money the company printed itself. And then we close the whole series out with what happened to Jackson after 1900. 🧂 BOONE ROCK AND THE SALT LICK CREEK SITE The brine comes out of the Sharon sandstone, in an arc-shaped valley that is the leftover channel of an ancient river system that drained this part of the continent before the ice sheets rearranged everything. The reason there's a town here is a river that stopped existing before there were people to see it. How they got the salt out, in four stages: shallow pans cut into the exposed streambed. Then deeper pits. Then wells thirty feet down into the valley fill, cased at the surface with a hollow black gum log. Then, chasing stronger brine, a well drilled four hundred fifty feet in 1815 — which didn't work, because someone had found brine on the Kanawha twice as strong. The rock is named for Daniel Boone, who was a salt boiler, and who was captured by the Shawnee in February 1778 while out making salt with about thirty other men. Whether he ever stood here is tradition, not record. In 1905 the State of Ohio sent an archaeological expedition here under William C. Mills, the leading Ohio archaeologist of his day. He examined what his report calls the Boone rock shelter — and concluded it probably wasn't suitable for anybody to live in. 🏚️ SALT LICK VILLAGE 320 East Broadway. Every structure on the lot came from somewhere else in Jackson County, and volunteers went and got it. The Scioto Township House off Cove Road, the McCoy Cabin from a Franklin Township farm, a railroad depot and caboose, and a building called the Village Post Office. The Jackson Historical Society has been assembling it for more than a decade, and they hope to build a replica salt-boiling operation on the ground. ⛏️ BUCKEYE FURNACE The only restored charcoal furnace in Ohio, and possibly one of only about three left in the country. Up to two hundred men worked it, at ten to twenty dollars a month, paid in scrip that could only be spent at the company store. Company-furnished housing was usually a log cabin with a dirt floor. It ran twenty-four hours a day and took a hundred teams of oxen to keep fed. One year of production consumed twelve thousand cords of wood, eight thousand tons of iron ore, and four hundred tons of limestone. That is what stripped these hills, and it is ultimately what killed the industry. The stone stack is original. When the land came to the state in the 1930s, it was all that was left. Everything else was reconstructed in the 1960s based on interviews with men who had actually worked there. The stone is 1850s. The timber is 1970s. The plan came out of memory. 📉 THE OUTRO: WHAT HAPPENED AFTER 1900 Jackson County built its last iron furnace in 1908. Jefferson Furnace made its last cast the day after Christmas, 1916. In the spring of 1937, in the middle of the Depression, the Chamber of Commerce invented the Apple Festival — and a town that had spent a century being defined by what it dug out of the ground decided to be known for something you grow. Then 1960 took everything. The Hercules Trouser Company closed and moved to Arkansas. And on September 4, Globe Iron exploded and never reopened. By the end of the decade the plant was leveled and a shopping center was built on it. Jackson went out and got more. Brick in 1961. Plastics. Goodyear in 1964. Fourth economy, same town. In 1900 Edwin Jones built a hotel for a town of fifteen thousand people. The 2020 census counted a little over six thousand. CHAPTERS 0:00 Boone Rock and the salt licks 0:00 Why there's salt here at all 0:00 How they made salt, in four stages 0:00 Daniel Boone 0:00 The 1905 archaeological expedition 0:00 Salt Lick Village 0:00 Buckeye Furnace: the company store 0:00 Up the hill to the furnace 0:00 What it took to run it 0:00 Outro: Jackson after 1900 📍 Boone Rock is off West Vine Street in Jackson. Salt Lick Village is at 320 East Broadway. Buckeye Furnace is at 123 Buckeye Park Road, Wellston — grounds open all daylight hours, year round. 🔔 Part 1 covers the salt, the courthouse, and the Cambrian Hotel. Part 2 covers the Jones family, the Markay, an 1883 hall nobody has entered in years, and a Hopewell burial mound. 💬 Corrections and additions welcome, and I need them on this one. If your family worked at Globe Iron, JISCO, or the DT and I shops, I want to hear from you. #JacksonOhio #OhioHistory #JacksonCountyOhio #AppalachianOhio #SouthernOhio #BuckeyeFurnace #HangingRockIronRegion #CompanyTown #LocalHistory #SmallTownAmerica