C.S.A. Salt Works

Located between Tow Valley and Old Bluffton, fifteen miles northeast and since nineteen thirty-five under Lake Buchanan, the Salt Works produced salt during the Civil War for table use, meat preserving, the diet of cavalry horses, and tanning hides. A day's boiling in one hundred iron two hundred fifty-gallon kettles produced twenty to thirty bushels of salt, which was cooled, sacked, and hauled out to meet Texas' wartime shortages. The first Llano County District Court was held at Salt Works, and a stagecoach stand was nearby. The brine here came from Cambrian Sea waters trapped five hundred million years ago in sand and strata, and Indians led the first settler here.

Buchanan Dam, Texas · United States