Jun 24, 2026 · 32 min · 12 segments
This week is the start of a few shows on the bad mic. And it is all my fault. But "A" mic is still better than no show at all. Let’s talk salt in late 19th century America. It used to be all…
At the start of the hurricane season, it seems like a good time to talk about, if maybe not visit, Padre Island off the southeast coast of Texas.
Save that for a different time of year.
The combination of the shallow shelf of the Atlantic combined with the prevailing currents has caused these sandy islands to grow up close to the shoreline of their coasts.
In ages past, they were favored launching points for fishing and whaling and worked as fish camps.
They also played an important role in softening the damage caused by seasonal arrival of hurricanes, the eye-shaped storms that spin up over the western Atlantic Ocean each summer.
The shallow water, compared to the much sharper walls of the Pacific over on the other coast, also causes heat to be held in the water.
One funny thing about all these sand piles that work as barrier islands is that to us short-lived humans, we have named them islands and we look upon them as stable and imposing.
They grow plants, animals make their homes there.
And in the case of Padre Island, down towards its south end, there was even a sea salt deposit so large an entire industry was built up around it in 1850.
Over time, saltwater had pooled in the area near that south end of the island around Laguna Madre for long enough that imposing slabs of salt were simply sitting there on the shore.
They had been picked up and used often enough by the previous local population and then on again and off again by Spanish colonials and then the independent Mexican population to attract the attention of the growing, ranching, and farming American homesteaders who had moved there as part of the project to balance slave-owning states with free states in the final years running up to the American Civil War.
For most people, the large, irregular slab sea salt was inconvenient for common use, but...
As rail lines spread across the North American continent, especially to capture the spreading cattle and farming industries, the town of Corpus Christi, with a long and interesting history of its own, became part of the supply network for the expanding American railroad economy.
So a salt mill was built there to take advantage of the salt pile that had accumulated at the south end of padre island the deposit was large enough that it was being harvested by crews of up to a hundred and fifty men for each transport trip back to the corpus christi mill the resulting ground salt was of different grades and used for a range of needs from table and cooking salt to a rougher product that was used as an additive for cattle feed, to make ice cream, which was a burgeoning industry in America at this time, to preserve meat for shipping, as well as to tan and preserve cow hides.
Yes, the next state north, but that could be at least 500 miles away.
And that was significant in an age when 20 miles away was a long way to go in a day.
In 1875, when a hurricane came through and not only rearranged the barrier islands in that area, it buried and washed away all of the remaining salt deposits.
The barrier islands of the Atlantic coast and their native inhabitants, they're fine.
The natural local flora and fauna have adapted to life on these shifting sands.
It's the people who are fooled by the word island and think of these overgrown sand dunes as something like permanent.
And so they do foolhardy things like build structures there that they expect to stay, even as hurricanes come through year after year, tearing apart pieces of the island and changing the shapes of these barrier islands as they always have and always will.
But the national parks and nature preserves take a more realistic approach to just exactly what a barrier island is and ever can be.
So when it's not.
hurricane season, come down to the Padre Island portion of the Texas National Seashore to see these places where birds and turtles and sand dune prairies all live with the uncertainty that is life on a barrier island.
And think about how even 150 years ago, Americans were being shown that these islands are truly only sand to shift under our feet.
or the Gulf of Mexico on the Caribbean Sea, and appreciate that Padre Island and all the other barrier islands need to be allowed to do their shifting sands duty of softening the blow that perennial hurricanes will continue to deliver.
A certain kind of life is suited to living there.
The rest is only asking to be knocked over by a sea driven by heat energy driven winds.
This week I'll be looking at the expanding role of salt in American food and industry as we find ourselves firmly in the mechanical and railroad age.
To learn about how, pull up to your place on the table and let's dig it.
Read the full transcript.
Create an account to read the whole episode, search across every transcript, and follow the shows you care about.
