Salt Mining & Manufacturing Print this page

Salt Mining:
In Schuyler County, salt, discovered as companies of hopefuls drilled for gas or oil, keeps two refining companies in business. Located 1,800 or more feet below the ground's surface, the product is brought to the settling tanks by a hydraulic mining process. It is also one of the contents of mineral springs and wells which once supplied spas where people came from far and wide to be "cured" of a variety of ailments in by-gone times.

Salt is a mineral essential to humans, plants and animals. The Watkins Glen mines sit on the Appalachian Basin, remnants of a sea that once covered parts of New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Ontario, Canada.

Although it is essential to many modern industrial processes, the basic methods of producing salt haven't changed for centuries: boil, evaporate, mine.

Evaporated salt is extracted from underground deposits lying anywhere from 500 to 2,800 feet beneath the surface. Fresh water is forced down a shaft, which dissolves the salt inside the deposit. The saturated water, called brine, is pumped back up to the surface where the water is removed through a heat process in a vacuum evaporator. This process yields evaporated salt, the purest of all salts: almost 100% pure sodium chloride

The two major salt companies on Seneca Lake , US Salt and Cargill Salt, Inc. produce primarily table salt and rock salt

Gas Drilling:
Those looking for gas and oil were scantily rewarded. A few wells produced sufficient gas for some lucky landowners to use in homes of businesses for a few years. The only commercially viable gas bed was found in the Tyrone area in the late 1920's. This is now managed in a compressor station by Columbia Gas Transmission Corporation. In the Town of Reading, Teppco has a large propane gas installation.

In recent years, new fields of natural gas have been discovered in the area, and companies are currently drilling to tap into those resources This Trenton River Bed Formation is said to be the largest field of natural gas on the East Coast.

Other Manufacturing:

Other major manufacturing interests are: Shepard-Niles in Montour Falls and Cotton-Hanlon and Coastal Lumber Mills in the hamlet of Cayuta.