Geocaching – The Ueltschey Tannery
The Ueltschey Tannery was established in 1857 by Albert Ueltschey (1824-1884), a native of Switzerland, who had moved from Texas to Mississippi after the Mexican War, settling near Nathan Springs. During Sherman's Meridian Expedition, when Sherman's 17th US Army Corps came through and camped in Morton on the 9th of February, 1864, Albert was employed to fix the broken bridles and saddles of the Corps. I am sure that he was well paid. Following the Civil War, cotton ginning and milling were added to the tannery’s operation.
Since the dawn of history, humans have made great use of leather. They’ve worn it, walked on it, sat on it, wrote on it. Turning animal skin into a durable product requires processing, and in primitive times, hides were tanned using animal brains, dung, urine, ash, and smoke. As our understanding of chemistry evolved, these materials were replaced by vegetable, mineral, and then nonorganic ingredients.
Today, synthetic materials have replaced leather in many shoes and boots; nylon and reinforced cotton have replaced leather in coats; and a cow hide is more likely to become gelatin than it is a saddle. All of this can make it hard to remember that at one time the manufacturing of leather goods was an economic engine sustaining many communities in the United States.
In colonial America, the creation of leather from animal skins was a crucial part of life. Back then, almost every farm and homestead prepared its own leather from slaughtered domestic or wild animals. With the rise of cities and the specialization of work, leather tanning quickly developed into its own industry.
In the 19th century, the process to convert animal hides into useable leather involved several steps:
1. After the hide was taken off the animal, it was covered with salt, which acted as a preservative.
2. After being shipped to a tannery, the hide was soaked in water until it was soft and any last pieces of flesh and fat were removed.
3. Next, hides were soaked in lime for several days. The lime solution dissolved the hair and epidermis and caused the hide to swell, which opened the fiber bundles in the dermis layer for later penetration by the tanning material.
4. After swelling, the hides were scraped, neutralized with vinegar, shaved into uniform thickness, and often split in half lengthwise for ease of handling.
At this point, the hides were ready for tanning. The hides were soaked in vats of an oak bark solution (Quercitannic acid is the chief constituent found in oak barks taken from young branches and twigs in oak coppices and can be up to 4 mm thick; it is grayish-brown on the outside and brownish-red on the inner surface), the mainstay of the southern tanning industry; produce light, yellowish-colored leather. In the early days of the industry, a hide spent about six months curing in the bark solution. The words "tanning", "tan," and "tawny" are derived from the Medieval Latin word tannare, "to convert into leather."
In the mid 1800s, fortunes were made and lost as entrepreneurs took advantage of the lucrative trade in leather. Tanneries spurred the development of communities, some of which still exist today. Tanneries were busy places working a 12-hour day with only Sundays off. Besides the men working at the mill, the industry indirectly used men as bark peelers. The bark peelers would set up camps in the forest during the spring peeling season and strip trees from dawn until dusk.