and contains about two hundred houses, all of wood, and built on both sides of the road. Trade is very brisk there; it consists principally in corn, which is exported to New Orleans. There are several very fine plantations in the environs, the land of which is as well cultivated and the enclosures as well constructed, as at Virginia and Pennsylvania. I went seven miles the first evening, and on the following day reached Springfield, composed of five or six houses, among the number of which are two spacious inns, well built, where the inhabitants of the environs assemble together. Thence I passed through Mays-Lick, where there is a salt-mine. I stopped there to examine the process pursued for the extraction of salt. The {118} wells that supply the salt water are about twenty feet in depth, and not more than fifty or sixty fathoms from the river Salt-Lick, the waters of which are somewhat brackish in summer time. For evaporation they make use of brazen pots, containing about two hundred pints, and similar in form to those used in France for making lye. They put ten or a dozen of them in a row on a pit four feet in depth, and a breadth proportionate to their diameter, so that the sides lay upon the edge of the pit, supported by a few handfuls of white clay, which fill up but very imperfectly the spaces between the vessels. The wood, which they cut in billets of about three feet, is thrown in at the extremities of the pit. These sort of kilns are extravagant, and consume a prodigious quantity of wood; I made an observation of it to the people
- [Footnote: River in Nicholas County, and the South Fork of the same at Hinkston's Ferry,
thence passed through Bourbon and Fayette counties to Lexington.
Washington was first settled by Simon Kenton, the well-known pioneer hunter, in 1784; it was laid out as a town in 1786; and was the seat of Mason County from 1788-1848. With the introduction of railroads, its importance declined.—Ed.]
