LA TIMES LEGACY OF INDUSTRY FUELED BY SLAVERY : SALT WORKERS WEST VIRGINIA by Makeda Easter - an excellent article.
Excerpt: 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.
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The Huntington has acquired at auction documents of the slave trade and Underground Rail Road. This acquisition is exciting to me as a genealogist.
HUNTINGTON ORG: This link tells more about the salt works acquisition as well as another important slavery acquisition.
Excerpt: The first group of materials includes the papers of Zachariah Taylor Shugart... a Quaker abolitionist who operated an Underground Railroad stop at his farm in Cass County, Michigan. The centerpiece of the collection is an account ledger which contains the names of 137 men and women who passed through Shugart's farm while trying to reach freedom in Canada...
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The second collection is the archive of some 2,000 letters and accounts documenting the history of the Dickinson and Shrewsbury saltworks, a major operation founded in 1808 in what is now Kanawha County, West Virginia...
