The Goose Creek Salt Works was established in the early 1790s and by the mid 1790s, when it was known as the Langford Works, it was well known throughout Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia. Because salt was essential for preserving food, the works became one of Kentucky’s most important industries, and in 1801 the state legislature allowed salt producers to take extraordinary measures to move their product across private property. In 1802, five years before Clay County existed, the legislature approved funds for a road from the Wilderness Road near present-day Livingston in Rockcastle County to the works. Salt was made here by boiling brine water from springs and wells in large iron kettles set in two rows over a stonework furnace, then storing it in casks made by local barrel makers. It was first carried by pack animals and later by wagons and carts, but most of it traveled by sixty-foot flat-bottomed salt barges built by local men, moving down Goose Creek and the South Fork of the Kentucky River during winter and spring floods known as salt tides, though several bargemen drowned in the treacherous rapids of the narrows downstream. Beginning in 1809, the legislature passed acts to improve navigation on Goose Creek and the South Fork to transport salt from this works and later from others along Goose Creek and Collins Fork of Goose Creek. The salt works, Clay County, and the City of Manchester began here because of the site’s proximity to the Warrior’s Path along Goose Creek. By 1806 the village around the Langford Works was being called the Goose Creek Salt Works, and that year Hugh White built a well-stocked wilderness store here and bought a one-quarter interest in the works. On April 13, 1807, the first meeting of the new Clay County government, including county and circuit courts, met here in Robert Baker’s cabin, attended by pioneer settlers including Baker, Adoniram Allen, and John Gilbert, along with salt men such as Hugh White and Daniel Garrard and a few wilderness lawyers. Much of the early drama surrounding the county’s founding occurred here, including the hanging of Joel Elkins in August 1807 for the murder of salt man John Amis, and Manchester was later built a short distance downstream on land donated by the salt men, including Amis. Robert Baker’s cabin is represented here by the Jesse Cotton cabin, one of the oldest surviving cabins in Kentucky, moved here from Cotton Bend in December 2010 but already more than a decade old when the court met in Baker’s cabin in the spring of 1807. The cabin had belonged to the family of Jane Griffin Cotton, headed by Zakariah Griffin, one of the county’s relatively few free black men, and it dates to before 1800, with family lore and local historical references placing it about 1792. A cabin built and owned by a black family now represents the birthplace of Clay County history, fittingly reflecting that enslaved people provided most of the labor in producing the salt that lay at the root of the county’s founding.