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 in salt production with 3.2 million bushels produced. During the Civil War, salt from the works at Malden was especially important to the Confederacy because it was necessary for preserving meat for armies. Salt businesses relied on owned or leased enslaved laborers who faced difficult and often dangerous conditions, especially in mining the coal used to boil brine, and slaves toiled at 52 furnaces that lined the Kanawha River for ten miles above Charleston. By 1850, 3,140 slaves lived among the 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 local salt industry was declining because salt fields farther west had developed and the meatpacking industry had shifted westward, and the Civil War and a record flood on the Kanawha River hastened its collapse. After the war, Booker T. Washington moved to Malden with his family in 1865 when he was nine, packed salt, mined coal, and worked for a wealthy local family, and the labor he performed there deepened his desire for education before he became a prominent educator and leading spokesman for African Americans from 1895 until his death in 1915.