Cedar Lake Salt Works

The plaque tells the Texas side, and a Union letter tells the other. Henry Washburn, acting master of the USS Morning Light, wrote home on November 29, 1862. On Thanksgiving Day he took three boat crews ashore and destroyed a large salt works with about ten tons of salt. The next day he went to wreck another works, and forty or fifty Texan horsemen attacked while his men broke the kettles. One sailor was killed and three wounded, and a ball grazed Washburn's elbow. He thought two riders fell. The letter does not name the works.

What the plaque says

Cedar Lake Salt Works Built in Confederate Texas in 1861-1862. Furnished essential salt to army and civilians. Raided by landing parties of Federals from Gulf ships, Nov. 27, 1862, lost buildings, 22 kettles, 4 large boilers. 10 tons of salt in hide bags was partly ruined. A nearby plant, when attacked next day, was defended by Texas calvary and escaped destruction. Winson's Works, below the San Bernard, was raided. But Moseley's Battery, 7th Texas Artillery Battalion, repulsed the raiders, wounding or killing 23 men as they got into their boats. (1965)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Levi Jordan Plantation State Historic Site — 6.7 mi
  A sugar and cotton plantation on the San Bernard River whose enslaved builders and their descendants left one of the best-preserved African American archeological sites in Texas.
• Varner-Hogg Plantation State Historic Site — 18 mi
  A Brazos sugar plantation built by enslaved people for the Patton family, later leased convict labor and Hogg family oil, now told through Rachel Patton and Sarah Ford.
• Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge — 23 mi
  Coastal prairie, salt marsh and bays between Freeport and Christmas Bay, where an auto tour along Big Slough passes wintering geese, ducks and wading birds in the tens of thousands.

More markers nearby

• St. Paul Missionary Baptist Church — 1.9 mi
• Bethlehem Christian Church — 2.1 mi
• Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church — 5.7 mi
• First Berean Missionary Baptist Church — 8.3 mi