"It happens that I grew up in a one time salt-producing region and often thought about the American salt industry. But when I went to look for published books on the subject I found none -- none, that is, save some technical treatises and a few pamphlets of a commercial or industrial sort, not to mention local histories and a valuable book or two on some specific phase of salt. There was nothing about the growth of the industry per se or of the men who made it. No one apparently had thought it worth while to dig out and assemble the facts essential to such a story. Salt, you see, is one of those simple, undramatic, matter-of-course items which we accept. Period. This dearth of salt books induced me in time to write a book on the subject. For facts, I turned to the archives of the Morton Salt Company, only producer operating in all the Nation's major salt fields. That Company was just on the point of celebrating its 100th anniversary, and therefore had a gratifying mass of facts about salt already assembled. Talks with the heads of the Company led me to take a "swing around the circuit" of the various Morton operations. First, though, I went to Syracuse, New York, the once "salt city" of early America. Then back to my native Kanawha Valley where, three-quarters of a century before, my forebears had made salt and where local histories yielded a good record of a vanished trade. Next, to the plains of Kansas; to the shores of Lake Michigan; to the solar ponds of Utah and the California coast; to the mines of Texas and Louisiana and to the big plant of Worcester Salt Company, at Silver Springs, New York. Information gathered from all of these various salt-making operations, past and present, bolstered by historical and industrial material obtained by research, forms the basis of this volume. In no sense is it intended to be a history of salt: one does not encompass a subject as old as the human race itself in the scope of one brief volume. I intend it to be simply a book about salt, from the reading of which one may better understand another of our Nation's great enterprises upon which we depend, and the men who have made it."--