The Salt City of the Inland Seas: how Manistee dug a fortune from brine

In 1879 a state geologist told the people of Manistee there was a fortune under their feet, and a lumberman named Charles Reitz decided to believe him. He drilled down nearly 2,000 feet and, in the spring of 1880, hit a thick vein of salt. That single hole rewrote the town’s future. As the white pine that built Manistee began to run thin, the salt below it gave the sawmill barons a second act.

The trick was clever and very local. Crews pumped water down to dissolve the underground salt into brine, pumped the brine back up, and boiled it dry to leave clean grain salt. The fuel was free: the sawmills had mountains of scrap wood and sawdust, and that waste fired the salt blocks. Lumber and salt fed each other so well that Manistee took on a swaggering nickname — the Salt City of the Inland Seas — and by the late 1890s it was turning out more than a million barrels a year.

The works clustered on the south side of the river and lake, out toward Filer City, where mill and salt block stood side by side. In 1922 a new salt factory rose on an old sawmill site on Fifth Street. The Morton Salt Company bought it in 1930, and — this is the part that surprises people — Morton still runs salt out of that same Manistee ground today, nearly a century later. The little blue box with the girl and umbrella has a Lake Michigan address.

So the place that boomed on timber didn’t go quiet when the forests thinned. It just looked deeper, found an ocean’s worth of salt sealed under the sand, and kept the lights on.