Before the Civil War, Alabama consumed about 50 pounds of salt per person per year, much of it imported from England and the West Indies through New Orleans, but wartime blockade and transportation problems created a severe shortage that became a salt famine by 1862 and spurred Gulf Coast production. Near the mouth of the Bon Secour River, a salt works spread across a square mile on both sides of the river, with 55 furnaces and 990 pots producing 1,980 bushels of salt a day, or 30,888,000 pounds a year, through brine drawn from marsh wells and boiled down in large kettles. Each furnace required five workers, wood had to be brought in for fuel, and 300 slaves provided the labor. Because salt was essential for curing bacon and salt beef used to provision the Confederate Army, it was considered as important to the Confederate war effort as gunpowder, and destroying southern salt works became Federal policy. On September 8, 1864, a combined army-navy raiding party led by Acting Volunteer Lieutenant George Wiggin left the Fort Morgan anchorage with three naval gunboats, the USS Tritonia, the USS Rodolph, and the USS Stockdale, and the steamer Planter carrying 250 soldiers under Major Pettibone of the Twentieth Wisconsin Volunteers to destroy the extensive works on Bon Secour Bay. Anchoring off Salt House Point that morning, the raiders went ashore and over the next two days broke 55 furnaces and 990 pots, cut the pumps, tore up the brickwork, dismantled 20 buildings, blew up two especially well-built works, destroyed nearby Camp Anderson, loaded about 30,000 board feet of lumber into barges, and burned what they could not carry away.