Redwood City March 2003: By the Salt Ponds

There are some salt ponds next to the Pacific Shores office park.

In his book Salt: A World History, Mark Kurlansky writes

...San Francisco Bay salt was considered of low quality... But in 1859, something happened that drove salt prices back up. In western Nevada near the California border, a three-and-a-half-mile stretch of the Sierra Nevada mountains was found to hold the richest vein of silver ever discovered in the United States... The silver ore was being separated by a technique similar to the sixteenth-century Mexican patio process, and it required mountains of salt.

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