Garrard is a
coal town
A coal town, also known as a coal camp or patch, is a type of company town or mining community established by the employer, a mining company, which imports workers to the site to work the mineral find. The company develops it and provides reside ...
in
Clay County Clay County is the name of 18 counties in the United States. Most are named for Henry Clay, U.S. Senator and statesman:
* Clay County, Alabama
* Clay County, Arkansas (named for John Clayton, and originally named Clayton County)
* Clay County, Fl ...
,
Kentucky
Kentucky (, ), officially the Commonwealth of Kentucky, is a landlocked U.S. state, state in the Southeastern United States, Southeastern region of the United States. It borders Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio to the north, West Virginia to the ...
, United States on the junction of
United States Highway 421 and Kentucky Highway 80, south of
Manchester
Manchester () is a city and the metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England. It had an estimated population of in . Greater Manchester is the third-most populous metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.92&nbs ...
.
It was established in 1806 by
James Garrard
James Garrard ( ; January 14, 1749 – January 9, 1822) was an American farmer, Baptist minister and politician who served as the List of Governors of Kentucky, second governor of Kentucky from 1796 to 1804. Because of Term limits in the United ...
's son Daniel (1780–1866) as a salt works, he having bought the land in 1798, but didn't actually gain the name until the
Cumberland and Manchester Railroad came through there in 1917.
It was through the 19th century rather known as variously the Goose Creek Salt Works (after the adjacent
Goose Creek), the Union Salt Works, the Buffalo Lick Salt Works, or just The Salt Works.
Its
post office
A post office is a public facility and a retailer that provides mail services, such as accepting letter (message), letters and parcel (package), parcels, providing post office boxes, and selling postage stamps, packaging, and stationery. Post o ...
was established on 1917-04-28 by postmaster James H. Brashear, and ''that'' was named Garrard, likely not after James or Daniel but rather after James' great-grandsons William Toulmin Garrard and Edward Gibson Garrard, who owned the land, although another story is that it was named after James' grandson
Theophilus T. Garrard.
Garrard family connections
Members of the Garrard family born at the salt works include Eliza Ann Garrard (1809, daughter of Daniel),
James H. Garrard
James Henry Garrard (October 23, 1810 – August 12, 1865) was a Kentucky politician. Garrard, the grandson of Kentucky's second Governor, James Garrard, represented Clay, Letcher, and Perry Counties in the Kentucky Constitutional Conventi ...
, Theophilus T. Garrard, Edward Pendleton Garrard (1814), Maria Pacheco Padilla Garrard (1815), Margaret Garrard (1818, daughter of Daniel), William Mountjoy Garrard (1822), Catherine Francis Garrard (1825), Lucinda C. Garrard (1827), Sophia Garrard (1830), and Pauline Mountjoy Garrard (1833).
19th century decline and Civil War destruction
The salt works were deliberately destroyed by the Union army in the
United States Civil War
The American Civil War (April 12, 1861May 26, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States between the Union ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), which was formed in 1861 by states that had seceded ...
, as a preventative measure after the Confederate side had boasted of their value as a military objective with respect to anything else in the entire state of Kentucky.
Confederate forces had captured Manchester in the summer of 1862 and had taken between of salt from the Garrard salt works and the works of their competitors the White family.
A report of the commander of the brigade who re-took Manchester, Charles Craft, explained the need to destroy the works, saying that "every circumstance led to the belief that the quantity
f salton hand would have been shortly taken" when his brigade left to fight elsewhere that it was needed, and that "as a matter of economy; the destruction of the works seemed to be a wise movement".
It took 500 soldiers 36 hours, overseen by three colonels of the regiment.
They disabled or destroyed all of the furnaces, pumps, and wells; and of salt found on the site.
Cannonballs were forced into pipes; pumps removed, broken, and then pushed back into wells; and the salt dumped into rivers.
A few "loyal citizens around and in the neighbourhood", as described in reports, were permitted to take some salt so that they had a supply for themselves.
Theophilus T. Garrard requested compensation after the war from the federal government, but this was denied.
Although rebuilt post-war, the salt works were not the major industry in the region that they had been pre-war, as competition from other saltworks elsewhere and improved transport drive down prices.
The salt industry had been in decline even before the war.
Although the Goose Creek Salt Works produced the same worth of salt in 1850 and 1860, the Garrards had had to diversity into increased farmland holdings, up from cultivated land and uncultivated in 1850 to cultivated and , although the valuation of these holdings had gone down from to .
In 1850 they had 11 employees at the salt works and owned 37 slaves; but in 1860 owned 21 slaves.
A continual pre-war problem for salt making at the Salt Works had been that Goose Creek river was only navigable at certain times of year for commercial shipping.
Several largely ineffective steps were taken to improve navigability, with Daniel Garrard along with two others appointed river commissioners in 1810 with powers to unblock the river, and a subscription raising measure approved by the
Kentucky General Assembly
The Kentucky General Assembly, also called the Kentucky Legislature, is the state legislature of the U.S. state of Kentucky. It comprises the Kentucky Senate and the Kentucky House of Representatives.
The General Assembly meets annually in th ...
in 1813.
The most effective measure was Daniel Garrard using 32 of his "hands" (i.e. slaves) to clear the
South Fork Kentucky River of obstacles in 1818.
Several calls were made by Garrard and others to further improve matters, to legislators that did not heed them, in part because of national economic depression that began in 1838.
A 1835 report by the Kentucky Board of Internal Improvements stated for example:
Other ideas put forward included a grand plan suggested in a 1836-01-19 report by R. P. Baker, Kentucky's first chief engineer, proposing a canal between the
Ohio River
The Ohio River () is a river in the United States. It is located at the boundary of the Midwestern and Southern United States, flowing in a southwesterly direction from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to its river mouth, mouth on the Mississippi Riv ...
and the
Atlantic Ocean
The Atlantic Ocean is the second largest of the world's five borders of the oceans, oceanic divisions, with an area of about . It covers approximately 17% of Earth#Surface, Earth's surface and about 24% of its water surface area. During the ...
that would arrive at
The Three Forks and proceed up the South Fork Kentucky River and Goose Creek.
It would then employ a canal from the Salt Works to the Cumberland River at
Barboursville, and thence via Yellow Creek, Powell's River, the Clinch, the Tennessee, and the Hiwassee, and the Savannah, to the
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico () is an oceanic basin and a marginal sea of the Atlantic Ocean, mostly surrounded by the North American continent. It is bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the Gulf Coast of the United States; on the southw ...
.
A survey was done in 1837, with the projected route to the Salt Works following the Cumberland from the Barboursville ford, along the Richland Creek valley, through a tunnel under the ridge to the Collins Fork of Goose Creek, and finally along Collins to the Salt Works; but nothing further came of the plan.
The canal would have required several locks to account for the height difference between the Salt Works and the Cumberland ford.
Railway
By the middle 20th century, Garrard railroad stop included a water supply tank, owned by the
Louisville and Nashville Railroad
The Louisville and Nashville Railroad , commonly called the L&N, was a Class I railroad that operated freight and passenger services in the southeast United States.
Chartered by the Commonwealth of Kentucky in 1850, the road grew into one of ...
.
It was west of the post office, and held , supplying per day to steam locomotives.
Cross-reference
Sources
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Further reading
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{{authority control
Unincorporated communities in Clay County, Kentucky
Unincorporated communities in Kentucky
Coal towns in Kentucky