Leslie Salt Company

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to be shown an extremely amusing comic about the history of salt.  This small book was put together by the Leslie Salt Company and I have posted a few pages below to show the process of salt production.  Though the animation on these pages is not as high-tech as we may be used to, it is still a very nice representation of the process of the evaporation salt ponds.

Courtesy of Leslie Salt Co., from the pamphlet "The Story of Salt: Necessity of Life"

Nearing the turn of the Nineteenth Century, the Leslie Salt Company decided to incorporate many of the small, family owned salt businesses of the San Francisco/East Bay area.  The Leslie Salt Company was the first major business that bought up family owned salt productions around the Bay Area.  Eventually Leslie owned land on both sides of the Bay where they would pump the brine to crystallizing ponds in Newark.  In the 1940's the Leslie Salt Company owned more private land then anyone else in the Bay Area with over 400 employees with an average annual production of 1,200,000 tons.  Following World War II Leslie saw the scarcity of land within the Area and decided to put tract houses in two major regions creating Redwood Shores and Foster City; the company literally filled up salt ponds and marshes to build these housing tracts.  

These groups of tract homes played a part in how Hayward became known for all of its seemingly endless miles of housing.  It's kind of cool to see this transition from the salt marshes to all of the built up industry and family homes.  So many people now live in these homes and have shown to be a major part of the Bay Areas history; the Leslie Salt Company has impacted how much of this has happened.  This only proves that all of these seemingly menial occurrences build up and make the history that we study today.