Appalachian History Series – Brashear’s Salt Works at Leatherwood: Salt, War, and Memory in Perry County
Where Leatherwood Creek meets the North Fork of the Kentucky River, the valley opens just enough for a bottom, a road, and a cluster of houses. Today visitors see a memorial park, a ballfield, and green highway signs for Cornettsville. In the nineteenth century the thing that drew people to this bend in the river was not scenery but salt. For roughly fifty years Brashear’s Salt Works, often called simply the “salt works at Leatherwood” or Brashearville, turned brine into white crystals that fed families, supplied livestock, and eventually pulled the Civil War straight into Perry County.
Salt, settlement, and the first industry of Perry County
Across Kentucky, salt was one of the first reasons people invested heavily in frontier industry. Hunters and early settlers needed it to preserve meat, cure hides, and keep livestock alive through winter, and long before railroads or coal camps, investors were already drilling salt wells and building furnaces in the interior of the state. A classic mid twentieth century study of Kentucky’s development notes that salt works appeared in many counties along the Appalachian front and helped anchor some of the earliest permanent settlements.
Perry County was part of that story. The Pike County Historical Society’s synthesis of early industry points out that salt making was the county’s first true industrial enterprise and that court records from January 1817 already refer to salt works on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. These early operations included Alexander Patrick’s works on Troublesome Creek and other small furnaces that relied on bored wells and long lines of iron kettles.
By the mid 1830s one of the most ambitious salt projects in the region rose at the mouth of Leatherwood. The Kentucky Historical Society’s “Salt Works” roadside marker at Cornettsville summarizes the site plainly: here in 1835 the Brashears’ well produced salt from a fine brine, and for half a century it supplied the area with that essential commodity before floods destroyed the works in 1892.
The Brashear family and a town at the kettles
The Leatherwood salt works took its name from the Brashear family, a clan already tied to salt and frontier enterprise elsewhere in Kentucky. Early markers and genealogical works trace Brashear kin to William Brashear of Brashear’s Station on the Salt River in Bullitt County, an eighteenth century fort that guarded another important salt producing region.
By the nineteenth century a branch of the family had settled along the North Fork in what became Perry County. The Brashear genealogical volume compiled by Henry Sinclair Brashear follows several lines of Brashears and Halls who lived along Viper, the North Fork, and Leatherwood, including men who appear in local business and military records around the time the salt works were operating.
Modern syntheses like the Pike County Historical Society’s “Eastern Kentucky Salt Works” and a regional essay on the “Appalachian Salt Boom” agree that Robert S. Brashear began operating the Leatherwood works in the mid 1830s. He drilled a well that first struck weak brine at about one hundred feet and eventually deepened it to over four hundred feet, where a stronger flow could be pumped to the surface. When properly managed, that brine yielded a bushel of salt from roughly sixty five to seventy gallons of water. In a typical year the works produced thousands of bushels, making Brashear’s operation the leading industrial site in Perry County.
A community quickly grew around the furnaces. County histories and later tourism materials remember the little settlement as Brashearville, with a post office, store, ferry, and clusters of houses along the river road. The Perry County Military Legacy Project notes multiple Civil War era enlistments that list Brashearville as the place where men joined up, a reminder that by the 1860s the salt works was also a neighborhood and a local recruiting point.
Life and labor at Brashear’s Salt Works
Descriptions of eastern Kentucky salt works in both nineteenth century reports and modern syntheses give a good sense of what Leatherwood would have looked and sounded like when the furnaces were running. Workers drilled or bored into the salt bearing strata, set pipes, and used animal or later steam power to lift brine into cisterns. From there it flowed into rows of heavy cast iron kettles supported by brick arches and stone foundations. Wood from the surrounding hills fueled the furnaces at first. As local timber thinned and coal became more accessible, operators burned coal from small drift mines to keep the kettles boiling.
A good brine was precious. Accounts of Brashear’s operations, as preserved in later economic surveys and summarized by the Pike County Historical Society, emphasize that the deeper well at Leatherwood provided a strong, steady flow, which allowed the company to produce several thousand bushels of salt annually. The Kentucky marker adds that salt from Brashear’s wells was sold locally and hauled to Virginia over difficult mountain trails by mule and oxen at about a dollar per bushel.
The workforce combined enslaved people and local white laborers. County histories and genealogical compilations for the Brashear and Hall families place enslaved workers on Brashear owned land in the antebellum years, while economic narratives stress how important those crews were in keeping the kettles fed with wood, tending fires through winter nights, and filling, raking, and packing the salt barrels.
On busy days the valley would have been choked with smoke, steam, and the smell of hot brine. Wagons and pack trains waited along the road, farmers brought livestock to trade, and customers haggled over prices shaped by weather, harvests, and the cost of hauling. Brashear’s Salt Works was not a city, but it was a place where money, labor, and regional networks met at the kettles.
Salt and strategy in the Civil War
When the Civil War reached Kentucky in 1861, salt suddenly became more than a local necessity. The Union blockade cut off much of the Confederacy’s imported salt, while both sides needed enormous quantities to preserve meat, cure leather, and maintain hospitals. Military treatises and later compendia of the war point out that campaigns were directed not only at railroads and rivers but also at salt works, including Goose Creek in Clay County and the middle and upper Kentucky River valleys.
Brashear’s Salt Works was an obvious target. In December 1861 Confederate Brigadier General Humphrey Marshall reported from eastern Kentucky that he had taken possession of Brashear’s works and hoped to secure thirty five or forty bushels of salt per week there and at a second works on Middle Creek, enough to keep his men supplied and to stockpile rations. That correspondence appears in the Official Records of the War of the Rebellion and is echoed in modern summaries of the salt campaign.
To secure a more stable supply, Marshall persuaded Robert S. Brashear to offer a formal lease of the property to the Confederate government. On February 1, 1862, Brashear proposed to lease about four thousand acres, along with the right to use the machinery, cut timber, mine coal, cultivate land, and station troops there for three years in exchange for two thousand dollars paid in annual installments. The proposal, preserved in Confederate records and quoted in Faron Sparkman’s study of eastern Kentucky salt works, reads less like a battlefield memo and more like an industrial contract, with its careful listing of rights and payments.
Confederate commissary officials hesitated. Other salt projects were underway in places they considered less exposed, and some in Richmond were reluctant to anchor production in a border state where loyalty was divided. Even so, for much of 1862 Brashear’s remained under Confederate control and became a magnet for skirmishes, scouting, and raiding on both sides.
The Battle of Leatherwood
The most famous of those clashes came on October 19, 1862, in what later sources call the Battle of Leatherwood. In the wake of the larger Battle of Perryville, Confederate forces retreated from central Kentucky, but units and guerrilla bands still moved through the southeastern mountains, looking for supplies and recruits. The leatherwood salt works, with its kettles, barrels, and stockpiled provisions, was a tempting objective.
On the Union side, one of the clearest accounts comes from Major B. F. Blankenship of the Harlan County Battalion of Kentucky State Guards. His “Report of Operations, October 1862,” preserved in the Kentucky Adjutant General’s papers, describes a detachment of about forty men detailed to go to the salt well at the mouth of Leatherwood Creek and join local Home Guards who wanted to enlist. As they moved toward the works, they ran into a company of roughly one hundred Confederate mounted riflemen under Captain David J. Caudill, part of Caudill’s regiment. Blankenship recalled a sharp fifteen minute fight in which his men stood their ground, fired from cover, and eventually forced the Confederates to withdraw, leaving several dead and Caudill mortally wounded.
Modern historians crosscheck Blankenship’s account with the Official Records, the Adjutant General’s published report, Frederick Dyer’s Compendium of the War of the Rebellion, and the federal Alphabetical List of Battles, all of which note the Leatherwood action in October 1862. These references typically list the fight as a skirmish at “Leatherwood, Ky.” or at “Brashear’s Salt Works” and tie it to the same handful of documents.
On the ground at Cornettsville, Kentucky Historical Marker 2478, titled “Battle of Leatherwood,” sums up local memory: the Harlan County Battalion attacked Confederate troops guarding Brashear’s Salt Works, drove them from the field, and briefly held the salt works. A paired marker titled “Salt Works” focuses less on the fighting and more on the long story of the wells themselves, reminding passersby that the site once supplied salt to the region for about fifty years before floods ended production.
Gilbert Creech and a wartime execution
The war’s imprint on Brashear’s Salt Works did not end with the 1862 skirmish. In April 1863 a Harlan County man named Gilbert Creech was executed there by Union authorities. Genealogical work on the Creech family, especially the detailed study “The Children of John Creech of Harlan County,” records that Gilbert “died April 14, 1863, at Brashear’s Salt Works in Perry County, Kentucky,” and ties that entry to contemporary military and county sources.
Later local histories and public history projects around the Thirteenth Kentucky Cavalry expand on that bare line, describing how Creech was tried as a spy or rebel collaborator and shot by a firing squad of soldiers drawn from several companies. A short video and social media posts by regional Civil War interpreters place the execution on the grounds of the salt works where later homes and the Cornettsville community would stand, underscoring how the wartime landscape overlaps with present day neighborhoods.
Together with the battle, Creech’s death fixed Brashear’s Salt Works in mountain memory as a place where the Civil War turned intimate and personal, not just a distant struggle of armies but a conflict that claimed neighbors at familiar landmarks.
Decline, flood, and the quiet of a former industry
Salt production at Leatherwood continued after the Civil War, but never with the same prominence. By the late nineteenth century refrigeration, changing transportation networks, and competition from larger salt operations elsewhere eroded the market. Sparkman’s study of eastern Kentucky salt works notes that Brashear’s remained in business into the 1880s, an impressive lifespan for a mountain industry that depended on local timber, coal, and wagon roads.
The state marker and a widely circulated review of that marker on travel and review sites agree that floods finally destroyed the old wells in 1892. By then the community was shifting toward other forms of work and identity. Brashearville became part of what is now Cornettsville. The kettles disappeared, the furnace walls crumbled, and the site blended into the ballfields, yards, and roadsides that line Kentucky Highway 699.
Technical publications, including U.S. Geological Survey water supply profiles from the early twentieth century, still list “Brashear’s salt works” as a reference point along the North Fork, and modern topographic databases carry a “Brashears Salt Works (historical)” entry for the old site. These dry tables and coordinates echo what county histories and family genealogies have long preserved in narrative form.
Remembering Brashear’s Salt Works today
In recent decades Brashear’s Salt Works has attracted new attention from county historians, tourism promoters, and regional writers who see it as a way to tell a larger story about Appalachian industry. The Hazard Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, in its mid twentieth century History of Perry County, devoted space to Brashearville and the salt works, linking them to the execution of Gilbert Creech and to the broader economic development of the North Fork valley.
Online projects such as the Pike County Historical Society’s essays on eastern Kentucky salt works and the Perry County Military Legacy Project connect Brashear’s to other salt sites from the Big Sandy to Goose Creek and to rosters of men who enlisted, fought, and sometimes died with Brashearville listed as their home. Genealogical pages for families like the Caudills, Creeches, and Brashears, in turn, weave Civil War service and salt work geography into family stories that have circulated for generations.
A regional magazine feature on “The Appalachian Salt Boom” encourages travelers to stand at the Salt Works marker in Cornettsville and imagine the line of kettles and smoke that once filled the hollow. The article places Brashear’s among other key salt sites and argues that these works formed an early industrial spine for the mountain South, shaping migration routes, surnames, and local economies long before coal and highways.
Every October, the nearby Battle of Leatherwood Memorial Park hosts reenactments that bring cannon, infantry lines, and school groups back to the fields near the salt works. Tourism materials from Hazard and Perry County promote the event as a chance to learn local history and experience the landscape that framed both the battle and the salt industry itself.
Standing at the marker on Highway 699, it is easy to focus on the Civil War story, on the brief crackle of gunfire in October 1862 or the grim scene of an execution the following spring. Yet Brashear’s Salt Works is also a reminder of a longer Appalachian history in which water, rock, and human labor combined to turn a narrow river bottom into a crossroads. For half a century this corner of Perry County was defined by the taste of salt on meat, the hiss of brine in iron kettles, and the steady movement of people who came to the mouth of Leatherwood seeking work, supplies, or news. Today only a sign and a quiet field remain, but the story of Brashear’s Salt Works still runs like a buried brine seam through the history of the North Fork valley.
Sources & Further Reading
Johnson, Eunice Tolbert, comp. History of Perry County, Kentucky. Hazard, KY: Hazard Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, 1953. Google Books preview. https://books.google.am/books?id=uuiDzQEACAAJ
Brashear, Henry Sinclair. The Brashear-Brashears Family, 1449–1919. [Kansas City, MO]: Tiernan-Dart Printing Co., 1929. PDF, Internet Archive. https://ia903101.us.archive.org/14/items/brashearbrashear00bras/brashearbrashear00bras.pdf
Pike County Historical Society. “Eastern Kentucky Salt Works.” Pike County Historical Society, n.d. https://pikecountykyhistoricalsociety.com/eastern-kentucky-salt-works/
Sparkman, Faron. “Salt Works of Eastern Kentucky.” Eastern Kentucky and the Civil War (blog), September 10, 2012. https://eakycivilwar.blogspot.com/2012/09/salt-works-of-eastern-kentucky.html
“The Appalachian Salt Boom: Eastern Kentucky’s Forgotten Industry.” The Appalachian Magazine, April 24, 2025. https://theappalachianmagazine.com/the-appalachian-salt-boom-eastern-kentuckys-forgotten-industry/
“Descendants of Phoebe Brashear.” Decatur County, Tennessee, TNGenWeb Project, n.d. PDF. https://tngenweb.org/decaturtn/families/brasher/phoebe_brashear.pdf
“Robert Samuel Brashear and Margaret Eakin.” The Family of Jesse and Rebecca Cornett (YeahPot Genealogy), n.d. https://yeahpot.com/brashears/samuel1763.php
“Ezekiel Brashear.” Letcher County, Kentucky USGenWeb, n.d. https://usgenwebsites.org/KYLetcher/articles/ezekiel_brashear.htm
“Samuel Brashear (1763–1829).” WikiTree, last modified April 10, 2018. https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Brashear-437
Genealogy Center, Allen County Public Library. “Periodical Source Index (PERSI): Location Search – Perry County, Kentucky (Land Records).” Entry for “Doctor Marion Miniard Gives Land for Brashearville, Robert Brashear Founder, Cornett Home, 1830s+,” East Kentucky Magazine 5, no. 1 (June 2005). https://www.genealogycenter.info/results_persilocation_detail.php?cosearch=USA&loc=KY&rectype=LN&sort=title&subloc=Perry
Dyer, Frederick H. A Compendium of the War of the Rebellion: Compiled and Arranged from Official Records of the Federal and Confederate Armies, Reports of the Adjutant Generals of the Several States, the Army Registers, and Other Reliable Documents and Sources. Des Moines, IA: Dyer Publishing Co., 1908. Internet Archive edition. https://archive.org/details/08697590.3359.emory.edu
United States War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1880–1901. Cornell University Library / Making of America digital guide. https://collections.library.cornell.edu/moa_new/waro.html
National Archives and Records Administration. “Civil War: Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.” National Archives, August 15, 2016. https://www.archives.gov/research/alic/reference/military/civil-war-armies-records.html
“The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies.” Digital Resources – Civil War Regimental Histories, Library of Congress. https://guides.loc.gov/civil-war-regimental-histories/digital-resources
“The Children of John Creech of Harlan County.” Mike’s Genealogy Pages, n.d. PDF. https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~mikesgenealogypages/genealogy/FamGrps/Creech/Articles/Children%20of%20John%20Creech%20of%20Harlan%20County.pdf
Perry County Kentucky Military Legacy Project. “American Civil War – D–Z (Perry County, Kentucky).” Perry County Kentucky Military Legacy, n.d. https://www.perrycountykentuckymilitarylegacy.com/9–kentucky–perry-county–american-civil-war–d—z-.html
Cook, Katey. “Historic Cabin Finds New Home at Civil War Battleground in Perry County.” WYMT, September 3, 2019. https://www.wymt.com/content/news/Historic-cabin-finds-new-home-at-Civil-War-battleground-in-Perry-County-559295891.html
“Walk Down Main Street in Whitesburg.” Letcher County, Kentucky Genealogy and History, KYGenWeb, n.d. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~kyletch/articles/walk_main_street.htm
“Brashear’s Salt Works (historical).” Various entries in online topographic and place-name databases (e.g., GNIS-derived gazetteers and mapping tools), accessed via third-party compilers such as TopoQuest. Example index: https://www.topoquest.com (search “Brashears Salt Works (historical) Perry County Kentucky”).
Author Note: As a historian of eastern Kentucky, I am drawn to places where industry, war, and family stories intersect in the same narrow valleys. I hope this look at Brashear’s Salt Works helps you see the quiet fields at Cornettsville as part of a much longer story about salt, conflict, and community along the North Fork of the Kentucky River.