Salt

Greeting family, friends and neighbors! Today's rambling is about a local industry that can be traced back to the original Ohlone people......Please Please Pass the Salt

Historic Ramblings 

PLEASE PASS THE SALT

Sea Salt was being harvested and processed in Hayward by the Oliver Brothers Salt Company up until 1982 from their evaporation ponds near the approach to the Hayward San Mateo Bridge, and the last remaining abandoned structures, rusting track and rotting blades from a few surviving wind powered pumps can still be spotted slowly decaying along the shallow shoreline. The first commercial salt company was established in Washington Township by German pioneer John Johnson in the early1850’s and by the end of the century there were more than a dozen small family owned companies producing hundreds of tons of the essential product annually from multicolored evaporation ponds at the southern end of San Francisco Bay. Andrew Oliver purchased one hundred and twenty acres for salt ponds in 1868 and harvested ten tons of commercial salt four years later under the company name of Acme Salt. With the use of wind powered screw pumps, Oliver was able to move slowly evaporating brine bay water from crystallization pond to crystallization pond, a long and tedious process taking up to five years, until the water had completely evaporated so that the remaining salt crystals could be collected with picks, shovels and wheel barrels. Salt shipments increased substantially in1877 when the South Pacific Coast Railroad was built through Hayward and adjacent to Oliver’s property increasing the companies inland market potential. With the passing of Andrew Oliver the family changed the company name from Acme Salt to Oliver Salt Company and increased evaporation pond acreage, processing and storage capacity, and in 1927 sold the business to Leslie Salt Company. Gus and Alden Oliver, Andrews Grandsons, returned to the family salt business by purchasing the Hayward evaporation ponds and creating Oliver Brothers Salt Company. Cargill purchased Leslie Salt in 1978 increasing production to over a million tons of salt annually from their Newark processing facility and thirty thousand acres of evaporation ponds. In 2003 Cargill began selling many of it’s salt ponds to the California Coastal Conservancy, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and to private foundations with the goal of ultimately restoring many of the ponds to natural wetlands just as they were centuries earlier when the Ohlone peoples first collected salt from South Bay tide pools.             -Bill  2/23