If West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio played trumps in the exciting game of Brine vs. Oil, Kentucky held the bowers. The home of James Harrod and Daniel Boone, Henry Clay and George D. Prentice was noted for other things besides backwoods fighters, statesmanship, sparkling journalism, thoroughbred horses, superb women and moonshine-whiskey. Off in the southeast corner of Wayne county, near the northeast corner of a six-thousand-acre tract of wild land, David Beatty bored a well for salt about the year 1818. The land extended four miles westward from the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, its eastern boundary, and three miles down the Fork from Tennessee, its southern line. The well was located on a strip of flat ground between the stream and a rocky bluff, streaked with veins of coal and limestone. Five yards from the water a hole nine feet square was dug ten feet to the rock and timbered. The well, barely three inches in diameter, was punched one-hundred-and-seventy feet by manual labor, steam-engines not having penetrated the trackless forests of Wayne at that period. To the intense disgust of the workmen a black, sticky, viscid liquid persisted in coming up with the salt-water and a new location was chosen two miles farther down the creek. Extra care not to drill too deep averted an influx of the disagreeable fluid which spoiled the first venture. Salt-works were established and flourished for years, a simon-pure oasis in the interminable wilderness. Beatty was elected to Congress, serving his constituents faithfully and illustrating the Mulberry-Sellers policy of “the old flag and an appropriation.” He secured a liberal grant for a road to his property on the South Fork and constructed a passable thoroughfare. Traces of deep cuttings, log-culverts and blasted rocks, still discernible amid the underbrush that well-nigh hides them from view, are convincing evidences of the magnitude and difficulty of the task. “The rocky road to Dublin” was a mere bagatelle in comparison with this long-deserted pathway. “Jordan is a hard road to travel,” says an old song, and the sentiment would fit equally well in this case. At one rugged point holes were cut in a rock as steep as the roof of a house, to afford footing for the mules engaged in drawing salt from the works! Considering the roughness of the country, the height of the hills, the depth of the chasms and the scanty facilities available, Beatty’s road was quite as remarkable a feat as Bonaparte’s passage across the Alps or Ben Butler’s “Dutch-Gap Canal.” Its spirited projector lived and died at Monticello, the county-seat, where his descendants resided until recently.