OTHER PIONEERS
Pg. 68

     Little is known of John Kight, and nothing is known of Shoup, except his name, and the date of his arrival, viz: 1800.  Daniel F. Dean came here before the end of the eighteenth century, and was the first man to lose his life at the licks by accident.  He met his death at a rolling, a heavy log crushing him to the earth.  His grave may be found on McKitterick's Hill, and a stone marked the place when I came to Jackson in 1889.  Davis Mackley, who became editor of The Standard before the pioneers had all passed away, published a number of notes, from which the following extracts are quoted:  I had frequent conversations during their life time with John Farney, John Kight, John Martin, Vincent Southard and Mother Sylvester.  John Kight informed me that he came to the salt licks in 1799, and there were then a few persons settled around the salt wells.  These salt wells were located around the western outcrop of the conglomerate, or

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salt rock, and the salt water to this day comes to the surface.  The western edge of the salt rock comes up in the bed of Salt creek, near Diamond Furnace, and the water dashing over it has cut quite a hole below the rock and causes a fall of nearly four feet.  The water was drawn from the salt wells in wooden buckets with a balance pole, or sweep pole, as it was called.  The water was boiled in the common sugar kettles.  The first white man who made salt here as a regular business was Mr. Conklin.  His furnace was in the bottom, nearly north of where Glove Furnace is now located.  The different wells and furnaces received such names as were suggested by the character of the persons by which they were surrounded.  There was a well and furnace near the railroad bridge, between Star Furnace and town, which was one of the most extensive establishments.  The persons operating this establishment lived in cabins on the high bluff, where is now the residence of James Chesnut, and where the Presbyterian Church stands.  This was called Purgatory.  The wells and furnaces near the Infirmary were called Paradise, and the next group, beyond the residence of H. C. Bunn, were named New Jerusalem.  The salt water or brine was weak, and it took several hundred gallons of it to make a bushel of salt.  It was boiled down with wood, which was cut from the surrounding hills.  When the wood became scarce near the furnaces and wells, other furnaces were erected nearer the timber, and the water was taken from the wells to the timber in logs, bored through and spliced together.  It was sometimes taken nearly a mile from the wells to these furnaces.  The salt boilers were utterly ignorant of the nature and use of stone coal, and although these salt wells were located in the vicinity of the best coal in the world, yet they never used a bushel of it.  There is a tradition that an owner of a salt well who needed stone to erect a furnace, used blocks of coal, which soon burned down and dropped his kettles to the ground.  (This was up near Petrea. - Ed.)  The pioneers related many anecdotes about the licks:  The story about being shot with a packsaddle at the licks has gone into history.  Some of the men named were present and told me how it occurred.  But I must first tell what a pack-

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saddle is.  It was made by taking two pieces of wood, so crooked that they would fit on a horse's back.  On the under side was fastened on each side boards some eighteen inches long.  These boards were fastened to the crooked pieces with wooden pins, and the under side was padded with linen, and between the padding and the boards it was stuffed with straw, chaff or hair.  On these packsaddles our fathers transported salt as far as Pomeroy, and West Columbia, West Virginia.  I must go back to the shooting with a packsaddle.  One of the kettle tenders at a salt furnace out of pure "cussedness" threw a packsaddle into the furnace.  It belonged to a man who had come some distance for salt.  The owner said but little and went home.  He procured another packsaddle, and put a quantity of gunpowder in the pad, and returned to the same furnace.  Some time in the night this was also thrown into the furnace.  The furnace was destroyed, but fortunately no one was hurt.