In the decades before the Civil War, the Kanawha Salines had a booming salt industry that created vast wealth, and by 1846 this area led the nation with 3.2 million bushels produced. During the Civil War, salt was essential for preserving meat for the armies, and the salt works at Malden were especially important to the Confederacy. The businesses relied on slaves, owned or leased, who faced difficult and often dangerous conditions, especially in mining the coal used to boil brine. Slaves toiled at 52 furnaces lining the Kanawha River for ten miles above Charleston. By 1850, 3,140 slaves lived among 12,001 white inhabitants, and more than half of the slaves worked in salt operations. Many salt-works owners lived in Malden, while others built large estates along the Kanawha River in Charleston to escape the heat and pollution of the furnaces, and several of those houses still stand on Kanawha Boulevard. By 1861, the industry was declining because salt fields farther west had developed and the meatpacking industry had shifted westward; the Civil War and a record flood on the Kanawha River hastened its collapse. In 1853, saltmaker Richard Lovell estimated the workers needed at his two furnaces, including coal diggers, wheelers, haulers, kettle tenders, cat hole cleaners, engineers, salt lifters and wheelers, jim arounds and packers, blacksmiths, and a "negro man sort of manager." Born into slavery on a Virginia farm, Booker T. Washington moved to Malden with his family in 1865 after the war ended, where he packed salt, mined coal, and worked for the Ruffner family; those labors deepened his desire for an education, and he later became a prominent educator and leading spokesman for African Americans from 1895 until his death in 1915, returning often to visit his sister Amanda Johnson.