>> sunday on american history tv on c-span3, the 1999 interview with the late senator robert byrd prior to the impeachment trial of president clinton. >> we have a great body of evidence before us. much of which is sworn testimony already. cross-examined, but it would be possible, in my own mind, for us to conduct a trial without having witnesses called. >> sunday at 9:00 p.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. our c-span cities tour takes american history tv on the road to feature the history of cities

across america. here is a recent program. alt-works dickinson's sa is the revival of a family business. my sister started evaporating and crystallizing salt with 50 manufacturers in the region which made this little valley in west virginia the largest producer. we are on top of a trapped ancient sea, a 600 million-year-old source. this has been dissolved by a freshwater aquifer which means it runs under us like a salty river. this was pushing up in springs and places, which is how it was discovered, mainly by large animals. deer and elk and buffalo were here. native americans came for hunting and gathering salt for

themselves, and as european settlers moved west across allegheny mountains they found this valuable source of salt, which we take for granted today, how important salt was before refrigeration. the salt industry really started to grow in the early 1800s. the ruffner family, the dickinsons, really started to grow this industry. it was an industry that grew on the backs of slaves. the valley was one of the largest industrial slave systems -- slave uses in the country, like many other industries. 500 slaves inr the valley and 250 on the property alone. by the 1840s we were the largest salt making region of the country. most of the salt was leaving and going to cincinnati, also called the hoglis because of

farming. once the meatpacking industry started growing up in chicago, the market in cincinnati started to wane. it started to go away. the dickinson family made salt until 1945, and we revived the business in 2013. and thep in the valley salt industry which is not something that was shared. i vaguely knew that we made salt and then i began digging into the family history when i was in my and at the same time filling 40's up my pantry at home with salt because it was so fascinating, different salts from around the world. and it was an aha moment. we decided to revive the salt industry because several key

points. we had this amazing family history our ancestors made for 160 years but also the movement of chefs and consumers toward really high quality foods made trust.ucers they can we don't add anything to our salt and we wanted to be made with solar evaporation and we hand harvest it. it is a product of mother nature rather than the product of a machine. we are here outside. we will walk you through the salt harvesting process, which starts here at the well it goes down 350 feet to draw the brine to the surface to fill our tanks. we pump 7500 gallons of brine a week. these are our holding tanks will weettle the brine -- where settle the brine you'd we have three of them, 2500 gallons each.

we need to settle the brine and then we move it into the sun house, where it starts to evaporate. we are in the quincy sun house which is one of our three evaporating sun houses. we put the brine in these big beds where it evaporates. we take it from 4% to 15% salinity. during that time we have calcium carbonate precipitate out and we of thee brine off calcification into crystallization. this process takes anywhere from 5, 10, to 15 days depending on the weather. we are at the whim of mother nature. we are in a building called the granary, which is what our ancestors called the building where the actual grains form or the salt crystals. we are looking at a bed here that is full of salt. we fill each of these 26 beds, an inch of evaporated brine down 15% salinity.

we allow it to continue evaporating until he crystallizes, which happens at 25% when solids form. to harvest, we use big scoops and scrapers and scrape the salt into a pile. like this. and put it into the scoop. and then we put it into a bucket where it drains back into the bed and stays for a day and so -- day until we get to our production facility read/write and- where we dry it package it. we are in our production facility. the salt comes in here after it is drained in the granary for a day and put it in the drying room where we have the humidifier that pulls extra moisture off of the salt. then it goes through a cleaning process that goes through the salt and for quality control and make sure it is 100% salt,

and pull out anything that is not salt with tweezers. our finishing salt is our flagship product. we also produce popcorn salt or cooking salt, and then grinding salt and flavored salt, west virginia ramp salt, ramps are wild mountain onions. very indigenous to west virginia. we do an applewoodsmoke salt and also a bourbon barrel smoke salt. we are all over the country, 600 accounts nationwide, restaurants and retailers and e-commerce worldwide. it is exciting. it is a little piece of west virginia goes everywhere. ics as an investor for the state of west virginia. it was not a role given to us but i think everybody in the state is an ambassador for what we love. we love our state and we love the companies that are here.

anything we can do to lift each other up is important to me. and important to most other west virginia producers. you can watch this and other programs on the history of communities across the country at c-span.org city stored. this is americans history tv only on c-span3. >> next on "lectures in history", emory university professor carol anderson teaches a class about efforts in the early 1960's to register african-american voters in mississippi. she describes some of the leaders of the movement, their tactics and the opposition they faced. -- faced from segregationists.