The Nameless Valley, Virginia, June, 1848.

Since my last letter was written, my course of travel has led me towards the fountain-head of the Holston river, whose broad and highly cultivated valley is bounded on the northwest by the Clinch Mountains, and on the southeast by the Iron Mountains. The agricultural and mineral advantages of this valley are manifold, and the towns and farms scattered along the stage-road all present a thriving and agreeable appearance. Along the bed of the Holston agates and cornelians are found in considerable abundance; and though the scenery of its valley is merely beautiful, I know of no district in the world where caves and caverns are found in such great numbers. A zigzag tour along this valley alone will take the traveller to at least one dozen caves, many of which are said to be remarkably interesting. From my own observation, however, I know nothing about them; and so long as I retain my passion for the revealed productions of nature, I will leave the hidden ones to take care of themselves.

On reaching the pleasant little village of Abingdon, in Washington county, a friend informed me that I must not fail to visit the salt-works of Smythe county. I did so, and the following is my account of Saltville, which is the proper name for the place in question: Its site was originally a salt-lick, to which immense herds of elk, buffalo, and deer, were in the habit of resorting; subsequently, the Indians applied the privilege to themselves, and then an occasional hunter came here for his supplies; but the regular business of transforming the water into salt did not commence until the year 1790. Saltville is located at the head of a valley near the base of the Clinch Mountains, and about one mile from the Holston river. All the population of the place, numbering perhaps three hundred inhabitants, are engaged in the manufacture of salt. The water here is said to be the strongest and purest in the world. When tested by a salometer, graded for saturation at twenty-five degrees, it ranges from twenty to twenty-two degrees, and twenty gallons of water will yield one bushel of salt, which weighs fifty pounds, (and not fifty-six as at the North,) and is sold at the rate of twenty cents per bushel, or one dollar and twenty cents per barrel. The water is brought from a depth of two hundred and twenty feet by means of three artesian wells, which keep five furnaces or salt-blocks, of eighty-four kettles each, in constant employment, and produce about two thousand bushels per day. The water is raised by means of horse-power, and twenty-five teams are constantly employed in supplying the furnaces with wood. The salt manufactured here is acknowledged to be superior in quality to that made on the Kanawha, in this State, or at Syracuse, in New-York, but the Northern establishments are by far the most extensive. The section of country supplied from this quarter is chiefly composed of Tennessee and Alabama; generally speaking, there is but one shipment made during the year, which is in the spring, and by means of flat-boats built expressly for the purpose. A dozen or two of these boats are always ready for business, and when the Holston is swollen by a freshet they are loaded and manned at the earliest possible moment, and away the singing boatmen go down the wild, winding, and narrow but picturesque stream, to their desired havens. The section of country supplied by the Kanawha is the northwest and the extreme south, while Syracuse, Liverpool, and Turk’s Island supply the Atlantic seaboard. The Saltville reservoir of water seems to be inexhaustible, and it is supposed would give active employment to at least a dozen new furnaces. As already stated, the yielding wells are somewhat over two hundred feet deep; but within a stone’s throw of these, other wells have been sunk to the depth of four, five, and six hundred feet, without obtaining a particle of the valuable liquid. The business of Saltville is carried on by private enterprise altogether, and the principal proprietor and director is a gentleman who comes from that noble stock which has given to this country such men as Patrick Henry and William H. Preston. I am at present the guest of this gentleman, and therefore refrain from giving his name to the public; but as his plantation is decidedly the most beautiful that I have seen in the whole Southern country, I must be permitted to give a particular description for the edification of my readers.

This heretofore nameless nook of the great world I have been permitted to designate as The Nameless Valley, and if I succeed in merely enumerating its charming features and associations, I feel confident that my letter will be read with pleasure. It is the centre of a domain comprising eight thousand acres of land, which covers a multitude of hills that are all thrown in shadow at the sunset hour by the Clinch Mountains. The valley in question is one mile by three-quarters of a mile wide, and comprises exactly three hundred and thirty-three acres of green meadow land, unbroken by a single fence, but ornamented by about a dozen isolated trees, composed of at least half a dozen varieties, and the valley is watered by a tiny stream of the clearest water. It is completely surrounded with cone-like hills, which are nearly all highly cultivated half way up their sides, but crowned with a diadem of the most luxuriant forest trees. A little back of the hills, skirting the western side of the valley, are the picturesquely broken Clinch Mountains, whose every outline, and cliff, and fissure, and ravine, may be distinctly seen from the opposite side of the valley, where the spacious and tastefully porticoed mansion of the proprietor is located. Clustering immediately around this dwelling, but not so as to interrupt the view, are a number of very large willows, poplars, and elms, while the inclosed slope upon which it stands is covered with luxuriant grass, here and there enlivened by a stack of roses and other flowers. The numerous outhouses of the plantation are a little back of the main building, and consist of neatly painted cabins, occupied by the negroes belonging to the estate, and numbering about one hundred souls; then come the stables, where no less than seventy-five horses are daily supplied with food; then we have a pasture on the hill side, where thirty or forty cows nightly congregate to be milked, and give suck to their calves; and then we have a mammoth spring, whose waters issue out of the mountain, making only about a dozen leaps, throwing themselves upon the huge wheel of an old mill, causing it to sing a kind of circling song from earliest dawn to the twilight hour. In looking to the westward from the spacious porticoes of the mansion, the eye falls upon only two objects which are at all calculated to destroy the natural solitude of the place, viz. a road which passes directly by the house at the foot of the lawn, and one small white cottage situated at the base of a hill on the opposite side of the valley. Instead of detracting from the scene, however, these objects actually make it more interesting, when the facts are remembered that in that cottage did the proprietor of this great estate first see the light, and that by its side are deposited the remains of five generations of his ancestors; and as to the road, the people who travel it all appear and move along just exactly as a poet would desire.

But to give my readers a more graphic idea of this truly delightful valley, I will enumerate the living pictures which attracted my attention from the book I was attempting to read on a single afternoon. I was in a commanding corner of the porch, and had closed the volume just as the sun was sinking behind the mountain. The sky was of a soft silvery hue, and almost cloudless, and the entire landscape was bathed in an exquisitely soft and delightful atmosphere. Not a breeze was stirring in the valley, and the cool shadows of the trees were twice as long as the trees themselves. The first noise that broke the silence of the scene was a slow thumping and creaking sound away down the road, and on casting my eyes in the right direction I discovered a large wain, or covered wagon, drawn by seven horses, and driven by a man who amused himself as he lazily moved along, by snapping his whip at the harmless plants by the road-side. I know not whence he came or whither he was going, but twenty minutes must have flown before he passed out of my view. At one time a flood of discord came to my ear from one of the huge poplars in the yard, and I could see that there was a terrible dispute going on between a lot of resident and stranger blackbirds; and, after they had ceased their noise, I could hear the chirping of the swallows, as they swooped after the insects, floating in the sunbeams, far away over the green valley. And now I heard a laugh and the sound of talking voices, and lo! a party of ten negroes, who were returning from the fields where they had been cutting hay or hoeing corn. The neighing and stamping of a steed now attracted my attention, and I saw a superb blood horse attempting to get away from a negro groom, who was leading him along the road. The mellow tinkling of a bell and the lowing of cattle now came trembling on the air, and presently, a herd of cows made their appearance, returning home from the far-off hills with udders brimming full, and kicking up a dust as they lounged along. Now the sun dropped behind the hills, and one solitary night-hawk shot high up into the air, as if he had gone to welcome the evening star, which presently made its appearance from its blue watchtower; and, finally, a dozen women came trooping from the cow-yard into the dairy house, with well-filled milk-pails on their heads, and looking like a troop of Egyptic water damsels. And then for one long hour did the spirits of repose and twilight have complete possession of the valley, and no sound fell upon my ear but the hum of insect wings.

But I was intending to mention the curiosities of the Nameless Valley. Foremost among these I would rank a small cave, on the south side, in which are deposited a curious collection of human bones. Many of them are very large, while others, which were evidently full-grown, are exceedingly small. Among the female skulls I noticed one of a female that seemed to be perfectly beautiful, but small enough to have belonged to a child. The most curious specimen, however, found in this cave, is the skull of a man. It is entirely without a forehead, very narrow across the eyes, full and regularly rounded behind, and from the lower part of the ears are two bony projections, nearly two inches in length, which must have presented a truly terrible appearance when covered with flesh. The animal organs of this skull are remarkably full, and it is also greatly deficient in all the intellectual faculties. Another curiosity in this valley is a bed of plaster which lies in the immediate vicinity of a bed of slate, with a granite and limestone strata only a short distance off, the whole constituting a geological conglomeration that I never heard of before. But what is still more remarkable is the fact, that within this plaster bed was found the remains of an unknown animal, which must have been a mammoth indeed. A grinder tooth belonging to this monster I have seen and examined. It has a blackish appearance, measures about ten inches in length, weighs four pounds and a half, and was found only three feet from the surface. This tooth, as well as the skull already mentioned, were discovered by the proprietor of the valley, and, I am glad to learn, are about to be deposited by him in the National Museum at Washington. But another attractive feature in the Nameless Valley consists of a kind of Indian Herculaneum, where, deeply imbedded in sand and clay, are the remains of a town, whence have been brought to light a great variety of earthen vessels and curious utensils. Upon this spot, also, many shells have been found, which are said never to have been seen excepting on the shore of the Pacific. But all these things should be described by the antiquarian, and I only mention them for the purpose of letting the world know that there is literally no end to the wonders of our beautiful land.