ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 14, 1996 TAG: 9607120075
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
TYPE: PROFILE
SERIES: Saltville: The Town that Wouldn't Die
SOURCE: CATHRYN MCCUE STAFF WRITER
William J. Totten rises from his chair and walks over to a poster-size photograph hanging in his basement - a combination office, sitting room and unofficial museum of Saltville history.
"That was in the late 1960s," he says, pointing to the picture.
A factory the size of a small city fills the frame. In the black and white grains of the old picture, the massive buildings seem stacked on top of one another. A dozen smokestacks of brick and steel send industrial gases into the sky.
In the far left corner are two factory workers, small and blurry, almost indistinguishable.
The Olin Chemical Corp. employed 1,500 people at the time, making it one of the largest companies in Virginia. Drawing on the town's famous salt deposits, its limestone and a loyal workforce, Olin had for decades supplied caustic soda and other chemicals used in hundreds of household and specialty products: bread, glass, soap, drugs, blue jeans, computers, paint, newspapers, explosives, ice cream, tires and more.
Totten was mayor then, in the days when the town shared the company's prosperity. Olin paid for the hospital, the golf course, the school and salaries for teachers and policemen.
In 1972, under pressure from environmental regulators to stop polluting, Olin closed the plant, ripping the economic heart out of this community. Gone are the smokestacks, the fumes and clatter of the once mighty industry. The school has merged with the Smyth County system, the hospital turned into offices, and the town has struggled to face modern problems with a meager budget.
"But you can hear the birds singing," Totten says. "And they'll keep on singing, and the town will continue to exist."
Some credit him with helping save the town from almost-certain ruin; Totten credits the spirit of the townspeople. "They were stronger than they realized. They were just chips off the old block."
Like Totten, many Saltvillians can trace their roots here back several generations, to when their forebears endured the elements, isolation, Indian attacks, war and long hours at the soda plant to survive in this scenic valley.
Totten walks over to a one-ton, cast-iron kettle sitting on the basement floor and describes how it was used a century ago to make salt by boiling the brine sucked out of the earth from depths of 200 feet and more.
During the Civil War, his great-great-grandfather came from Tennessee to help defend the town against Union attacks. On the train home after the war, he got off in Marion. "See, he'd fallen in love with a girl here. He walked to Saltville and married her," Totten says, smiling, as if the story tickles his memory. "And he never went back to Tennessee."
A short man, made shorter by 85 years, Totten stands close to people to hear better, despite hearing aids in both ears. He asks that his picture not be taken this day because he's wearing a sweatshirt, casual slacks, an Atlanta Braves cap - and no bowtie. Totten, whom some still call "mayor," knows well how publicity influences Saltville's public image.
"The eyes of the nation were focused on this little community," says Totten, who was interviewed and photographed many times as the story of Olin's shutdown went national, then international.
In recent years, though, someone else has come to represent Saltville to the outside world.
Fred Dye never worked at Olin; he was 15 when the company shut down. Nonetheless, the company has been part of his daily life for five years.
Dye is president of Mountain Empire Environmental Team, a small group made up mostly of his kin and friends. Originally, they set out to stop a proposal by a company called Three Seasons to build an incinerator in town that would burn contaminated soil hauled in from outside the region.
They failed, but as Dye earned a reputation as an environmentalist he began getting calls from local people concerned about pollution at some of Olin's old dump sites. With Rusty Cahill, his childhood chum, Dye began pressing Olin and state and federal officials for more information about the pollution, efforts to clean it up, and possible health and environmental effects.
To many Saltvillians, the group's activities amounted to civil disobedience. "I'm sure you've heard that we're rabble-rousers," Cahill says.
The two men were shown on television and quoted in newspaper stories demanding better studies of the town's pollution problems and more extensive cleanup. Callers to Dye's home usually got his answering machine, which explained that he was "out fighting for environmental justice," please leave a message.
"What our goal is, we would like to see the river, the crayfish, the whole works, back to normal," Dye says.
Some think the group is stirring up trouble. They worry that "bad press" about the town's pollution will hurt efforts to raise money for an ambitious museum project. Aspiring to the future, they'd rather focus on the town's pre-historic past.
A place with `great geology'
Saltville sits in the middle of Rich Valley, which runs between two long mountain ridges in Southwest Virginia. The seven smaller hills that ring Saltville bear names such as Goat Hill, Mill Cliff and Lovers Leap. The stone mass and spire of the Madam Russell Methodist Church - named for Patrick Henry's sister who lived here - stands out amid the cluster of buildings that make up the downtown. A few blocks to the west are six scattered ponds known as "the wellfields."
Underneath one of these salty ponds, hidden in the clay, lie the remains from another day, artifacts and fossils that have put Saltville on the archaeological map.
As far back as the late 1700s, people were finding mementos of the Ice Age - a mastodon tooth that was sent to Thomas Jefferson, and footprints and femurs of ground sloths, musk ox and other extinct creatures.
Saltville's underground treasure trove made national news in April when it was announced that the oldest evidence of human life in the Western Hemisphere had been found here. The discovery, dated at 13,950 years old, beat out by 150 years the South American site thought, until now, to be the oldest.
"It's just a small Appalachian community that happens to have great geology, an unusual concentration of natural resources," says Jerry McDonald, who, as leader of a paleontological and archaeological research team for the Virginia Museum of Natural History, made the discovery.
Millennia ago, the whole region made up the eastern reaches of an inland ocean. As the earth shifted, a salt lake was left behind, 1,700 feet above today's sea level. As the lake disappeared, huge deposits of rock salt formed, estimated at 500-feet thick in some places. The big animals were drawn to the salt, and early Indians were drawn to the animals and the "magic white sand."
In a geologic twist of fate, the soil around Saltville is mostly clay, which acted as a pre-historic Ziploc bag, sealing in the plants and animals that died at the salt lick, sealing out water and oxygen that decay organic matter. In this clay, McDonald found clues to human presence - stone and quartz, not native to the Saltville Valley, and tusks and bones fashioned into tools.
So far, he's found no human skeletons, although he still hopes to find the remains of a pre-historic fellow who "fought a musk ox and lost."
Charlie Bill Totten, an amateur digger and nephew of the former mayor, was on the job as the town's maintenance man in 1980 when he stumbled upon one of the most significant finds to that point.
"I was just walking along the drainage ditch, looking for arrowheads, things like that," Totten says. He spied a bone protruding from the ground, scraped the dirt away with his pocket knife, and saw it was a vertebra, about the size of a Pepsi can.
"And adjacent to it, thank the Lord, was another vertebra." Then a rib, and another rib - bones that were later confirmed as the second-most complete skeleton of a musk ox ever found.
Totten still works for the town, as both maintenance man and tourism director. On any given day, Charlie Bill can be seen in his coveralls fixing sewers, repairing sidewalks, or leading a group of schoolkids around the wellfields, a "Saltville: Dig It" cap perched on his head.
Totten's musk ox drew McDonald, at the time a Radford University professor, to Saltville. Since then, McDonald has spent enough time here, both digging in the dirt and hanging out with the townfolk, to become an honorary Saltvillian, even though he now lives in Florida. He's planning another dig in August.
Not only has the ground here yielded clues to ancient natural and human history, it set the course for what Saltville is today - and hopes to be in the future.
Salt Capital of the Confederacy
A small historical park, occupying a single lot on the west end of town, was built in 1972 as part of the town's campaign to boost tourism and save itself after Olin left. It features two old log cabins, an original steam-driven pump, with a 50-foot cross beam and a huge wooden wheel, and five rusting, iron salt kettles as big as hot tubs. At the far end, a tattered wooden fence surrounds a 3-foot stack of bricks and a mound of dirt - original remains of the town's first salt furnace.
The year was 1790, and entrepreneurs were cashing in on the valley's mineral bounty. Several companies staked their claims, each one sinking wells and building furnaces. Nearby hillsides were clearcut to provide firewood, and slaves were imported to keep hundreds of kettles boiling constantly.
Saltville's brine is 43 percent salt - saltier even than ocean water. As it came to a boil, cold brine was poured in, creating a chemical reaction that sank the solid salt to the bottom, where it was scooped out. The salt was packed in barrels, loaded on barges and floated down the North Fork of the Holston River to Knoxville and markets south.
Nowadays, during the town's Labor Day festival, members of the Saltville Historical Society make salt the "old-fashioned" way, using the old pump and kettles at Salt Park. But instead of shipping it out on barges, they sell the salt - unbleached and natural as it gets - in small sacks stamped with the town's motto: "Salt Capital of the Confederacy."
During the war, more than 2,000 salt kettles here supplied Confederate troops with the period's only known food preservative - 4 million bushels in 1864. On Oct. 2 of that year, Union troops attacked Saltville, but were driven back by a Confederate force almost half the size.
One of the town's less glorious footnotes occurred that night, when the victorious Confederates slaughtered dozens of wounded and captured black soldiers. Charlie Bill Totten says most people still talk about the "Saltville massacre" in hushed tones, and some don't believe it happened at all. "That gives you an idea of how long it takes things to come out here," Totten notes.
Two months later, the Yankees returned, and this time destroyed the salt works, choking the salt wells with canon balls. But Saltvillians dug out the wells, rebuilt, and within weeks were producing salt once again.
After the war, demand for salt remained high, and the town grew. The salt tycoons built up the town, its churches, inns, houses and stores, the jail and mayor's office, too. As the century came to a close, a new breed of businessmen began eyeing the salt works. Industrialists were discovering that the sodium chloride in salt and the calcium carbon in the limestone prevalent in the Saltville Valley could be combined to make a host of products.
In 1893, a group of investors who came to be known as "the Saltville Seven" acquired a British-patented method of making soda ash and bleaching powder, bought 12,000 acres of Saltville, including the wellfields, and incorporated as the Mathieson Alkali Works. A new era had begun.
`It can't be good for ya'
A row of hills flanks downtown Saltville to the north, save for a narrow gap where Virginia 634 sneaks through and follows the rusted railroad tracks to the North Fork of the Holston River half a mile away.
Here on the south bank sits an old-fashioned, two-story, red brick building. Behind it, a low-slung, bright blue, pre-fabricated industrial structure stretches for nearly a quarter mile along the river.
T.D. Wheel Co. is Saltville's largest employer today, with 250 workers turning out wheel rims for earth-moving equipment and other large vehicles. Part way up the hill behind the company hulks a mammoth steel building, its windows smashed out by several generations of vandals. This used to be Olin's power plant, and the brick building its offices - almost all that remains visible of the former industrial giant that started out as the Mathieson Alkali Works.
On the Fourth of July, 1895, M.A.W. cranked up its new plant and rolled out the first barrels of soda ash and caustic soda. The company also began that day filling the first of several giant pits with the waste of its process, a whitish gray slurry called "muck" that could burn skin and eat through clothing. It was piped across the river, up an embankment and dumped into muck ponds.
Some folks today remember playing on the fenced-off ponds after the company shut down and telling stories of the "muck monster" who would burn people's skin off. Kids still sneak in and drive four-wheelers over the old ponds.
Charlie "Sonny" Neal rolls up his sleeves and displays several reddened spots on his arms. "That stuff, it'll tear your hide off," he says.
Neal and his wife, Dottie, live in one of 46 homes in Perryville, a single street built on top of the first muck dam. When the company needed to expand its operations in 1950, it moved the homes to the muck pond, which had filled up many years before.
A few years back, Neal was putting a heater in his basement when he hit the muck - just one to two feet below the surface. The fumes made his eyes and nose sting and he couldn't breathe.
Last year, federal health officials took samples from his basement and yard. They found pH levels almost double what's considered neutral, and traces of inorganic metals, petroleum, pesticides and other compounds - but, they assured him, not at levels harmful to humans. They gave him a pamphlet on indoor air pollution, and told him to avoid contact with the muck.
"I don't trust the government at all," Neal says. "Look at what they done at Waco." His doctor told him he has lupus, and his wife has chronic "nerve problems." He knows of others in Perryville who've died of cancer. He remembers his grandfather coming home from his job at the plant, big holes in his overalls where the caustic soda dripped on him, burns on his skin.
"What I want to find out is what I'm living on. It can't be good for ya. It don't take a rocket scientist to look at that stuff and know it can't be good for ya."
Recalling a disaster
For every ton of product Mathieson made, there was a ton of muck to get rid of. As the ponds filled up, the company built earthen berms around the edge to heighten the dumps. In 1924, the berm on Pond 2 broke.
"It happened on a Saturday night, about 8 o'clock, on Christmas Eve. It was cold, raining," recalls Hugh Helton, who runs an appliance store in town and refurbishes antique pump organs. He finds his folder of Saltville history and pulls out a yellowed newspaper article written in 1980 about the disaster.
"Nineteen people died, and they just let it pass, more or less," Helton says. The muck poured into the river, flooding a small cluster of homes known as Palmertown. Helton remembers his father taking him down to the flooded river the next day. They spotted a rooster on the roof of a house submerged in the thick muck, like setting cement. The rooster crowed three times.
Helton remembers the story of two little girls who were asleep upstairs when the dam broke. The flood wiped out the bottom half of their house, killing their family, and swept the top part of the house downstream. They were found the next day, freezing and covered in muck, by rescuers who heard their cries. They had to saw a hole in the roof to get them out.
Mathieson donated $2,000 to the emergency fund, paid for lost livestock, homes and belongings, and offered $25 for every body found.
The next year, the company sent a new plant manager, R.B. Worthy, to Saltville. One of his first projects was to straighten a bend in the North Fork, move the few remaining houses in Palmertown, and build muck Pond 5 where the river once ran.
Today, that dump is about 100 feet high, covers 76 acres, and holds enough muck to fill half the Empire State Building. It's also on the national Superfund list as one of the worst hazardous waste sites in the country.
Olin Corp., which manufactured caustic soda, closed its plant in 1972, leaving behind 1,500 unemployed Saltvillians and a host of environmental problems. Sonny Neal (above) literally lives on top of a byproduct of Olin Corp.'s process - a slurry called "muck" that can burn skin and eat through clothing.
LENGTH: Long : 351 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY Staff 1. The Southwest Virginia town ofby CNBSaltville sits in Rich Valley, which is visible from an overlook on
Virginia 107.
2. William J. Totten (headshot)
3. Charlie Bill Totten was on the job as Saltville's maintenance
man in 1980 when he stumbled upon the second-most complete skeleton
of a musk ox ever found. Here he poses at the most recent
archaeological dig site.
4. Rusty Cahill (left in photo at left) and Fred Dye are members
of the Mountain Empire Environmental Team, a group that began
pressing Olin Corp. and state and federal officials for information
about the town's pollution, efforts to clean it up, and possible
health and environmental effects. 5. T.D. Wheel (above), now the
largest employer in Saltville, is located on property that once
belonged to Olin. The red brick building in the background is an
original Mathieson Alkali Works building.
5. Olin Corp., which manufactured caustic soda, closed its plant
in 1972, leaving behind 1,500 unemployed Saltvillians and a host of
environmental problems. 6. Sonny Neal (above) literally lives on top
of a byproduct of Olin Corp.'s process - a slurry called "muck" that
can burn skin and eat through clothing. color. Thomas W. Totten
collection 7. Muck field No. 2, circa 1917. In 1924 the dam here
broke, killing 19 townspeople.< 8. Olin Corp., circa 1969-71,
shortly before the plant shut down.
9. The Saltville well fields, circa 1917.
10. Map of Saltville. staff. color.
The staff behind this series Cathryn McCue has been a reporter at
The Roanoke Times for seven years and spent the past three covering
environmental issues. Raised north of the Mason-Dixon, she became
enamored of Saltville during her first visit in 1994. In June,
shortly after completing this project, she joined the staff of the
Southern Environmental Law Center in Charlottesville.
Eric Brady has been a part-time photographer at this newspaper
since 1988 while employed at New River Community College. He now
works at the paper full time. He grew up in Floyd County and lives
in Pulaski. He also has worked for newspapers in Richlands, Pulaski,
Bluefield and Kingsport, Tenn.
PHOTO: McCue< Brady (headshots) color.
Company chronology
1895: Mathieson Alkali Works in Saltville begins operations.
1924: Dam at muck pond breaks, killing 19 people.
1925: Pond 5 built.
1950: Mathieson builds chlorine plant, which uses a mercury
electrode process.
1954: Mathieson merges with Olin Corp. to form Olin Mathieson
Chemical Corp., eventually shortened to Olin Corp.
1961: Under contract with the Department of Defense, Olin builds
hydrazine plant for rocket fuel.
1963: Pond 6 built.
1969-70: Mercury contamination at the Saltville plant discovered.
May 7, 1970: Virginia Water Control Board notifies Olin of new
pollution standards and requests compliance plan by June 15.
July 7, 1970: Olin tells water board it plans to close the soda
ash plant.
Sept. 22, 1970: State Department of Health issues emergency
fishing ban in the North Fork of the Holston River from Saltville to
Tennessee line. Tennessee issues similar ban.
July 1, 1971: Soda ash plant closes. Over the next several
months, Olin shuts down its bicarbonate of soda plant, carbon
dioxide plant and chlorine plant.
July 3, 1972: The last of Olin's factories in Saltville closes.
1973-74: Most of the plant is demolished.
November, 1974: Virginia eases fishing ban to "catch and
release."
1978: Various federal, Virginia and Tennessee agencies form task
force to assess pollution at Saltville. Erosion control and other
preliminary cleanup measures ensue.
December, 1982: Ponds 5 and 6, and the former chlorine plant site
listed on EPA's Superfund list.
1988: Consent decree for cleanup signed by Olin and EPA.
1994: Newly constructed wastewater treatment plant begins
treating mercury-tainted runoff from Pond 5.
1995: EPA agrees to Olin plan to upgrade caps on Ponds 5 and 6.
1996: EPA and Olin begin negotiations on how to clean up the
river and the chlorine plant site.