Malden was an early center of salt making whose industry peaked in the 1850s. In 1755, Mary Ingles and Betty Draper made salt here at Buffalo Salt Licks for their Indian captors. John Dickinson bought the site in 1785, and wells sunk by Brooks and Ruffners in the early 1800s led to thriving salt and related industries. It was also the site of African Zion Baptist Church, the state's black Baptist mother church, placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980. Booker T. Washington, born about 1856 in a slave cabin in Hales Ford, Virginia, spent his early childhood in Kanawha Salines, now Malden, where he worked days in the salt industry and attended school for blacks at night. After graduating from Hampton Institute, he returned for two years to teach public school and Sunday school, and later, as president of Tuskegee Institute, he often visited his half sister Amanda Johnson there.