Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Grand Saline, TX

Grand Saline is known as the "Salt Capital of Texas" because of the extensive salt deposits and mines southeast of the city.

The Caddo and Cherokee peoples were the first to work the area's salt prairie, evaporating brine from the salt flats and trading the salt for other goods.

In the mid-1800s settler John Jordan set up a primitive salt works, and the community that grew around it - Jordan's Saline - briefly served as the seat of Van Zandt County.

The town took the name Grand Saline when the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived in 1873.

Grand Saline was first incorporated on December 16, 1895; it was disincorporated in 1898 and reincorporated on July 6, 1900.

Morton Salt acquired all of the local salt companies in 1920 and sank the Kleer Salt Mine into the salt dome by 1931, and by 1945 it employed about 950 people in the area.

Grand Saline sits atop a massive, exceptionally pure salt dome that descends thousands of feet below the surface, and Morton Salt has mined it since 1931.

In 1982 Morton Salt produced about 400,000 tons of salt from its Grand Saline mines.

Grand Saline's Salt Palace, first built for the 1936 Texas Centennial and since rebuilt, is made of pure rock salt and is described as the only building in North America made of pure rock salt; it now serves as a museum and visitor center.

Grand Saline had a population of 3,107 at the 2020 census, living in 1,100 households, making it the third-largest city in Van Zandt County.