The site of a major Salt Works run by Samuel Q. Richardson, it was also the county that, according to baum2008, experienced the highest percentage increase in the number of slaves taxed between 1860 and 1864, jumping by 1,170 slaves or 402%.

A possibly apocryphal story, told in 1919, may confirm both the low number of slaves in the county before the war and the arrival of Refugeed Slaves during the 1860s:

… Van Zandt county was created from territory of Henderson county, and had been stigmatized ‘free territory’ [because of perception that land was given for free]. When secession was accomplished it was self evident that war would inevitably follow. Slave owners along the borders at once set about looking out places of safety for their property. Many slaves were brought to Texas during that contest. For that purpose the owner of a large number of slaves sent a slave driver to Texas to look out a place of refuge for his slaces. This man came by steamboat to Jefferson; there he secured a horse and saddle and came out on horseback to Gilmer, Quitman and on to Canton, stopping at the Bivins hotel, the principal hotel in the town. Editor [Sidney Smith] Johnson, of the [Canton] Times, heard that a slave driver had blown in town and so he called on him at his hotel, and in the run of conversation, made bold to ask him if he thought he would bring his slaves to Van Zandt county. “H—l, no,” came the reply, “I had as soon think of taking them to a free state, I came all the way from Quitman here and never so much as saw a slave.”¹

After the War

As noted on Salt Works page, some evidence suggests that Jordan’s Saline was a center of postwar violence by white terrorist groups directed at freedpeople. Wentworth Manning’s 1919 book contains the additional story of a “Dr. Page” murdered by the Ku Klux Klan.²