GRAND SALINE, Texas — Texas has a lot of fan favorite museums, but one North Texas museum is, without a doubt, the most lickable museum in America.
Yes, lickable. Not likeable.
In fact, it may be the only lickable in existence.
“The building is made of salt,” said Tomasa King, one of the experts at the Salt Palace Museum in Grand Saline. “You can actually go out there and lick it.”
A lot of people have gotten a taste of The Salt Palace Museum, which sits about an hour east of Dallas.
There’s no telling how many people have licked the walls of the museum, but King says germaphobes, have no fear.
“Salt kills all germs just to let you know,” she said.
So, what is The Salt Palace, and why on Earth would anyone build a museum using salt?
“We have just a huge, beautiful mountain of it,” King said.
The first discovery of salt wasn’t a mountain, it was more of a pancake. The Caddo Indians discovered a salt flat above the ground more than 1,000 years ago.
“For 1,000 years, different tribes would come through here because they knew it was the place for salt,” King said.
However, the salt flat, which still exists, was just scratching the surface. For an entire millennium, neither the Caddo nor anyone knew what lie underneath, until the Morton Salt Company came to town in the early 1900s.
“We do a lot of the world’s salt from here, and people don’t even know we exist most of the time,” King said.
Beneath Grand Saline is salt – spectacularly palatial salt mines with towers of sparkling white crystals all around. As Mount Everest is high, Grand Saline’s salt is deep – four miles deep – enough salt to last another 20,000 years.
“If you buy salt and you look on the bottom and it says GS that means it came from Grand Saline,” King said.
To show their pride, the city’s residents built the original Salt Palace in 1936 during Texas’ centennial. Eventually, that structure dissolved. It was made of salt after all. But they kept rebuilding.
Today, the building that exists is the fourth Salt Palace, now a permanent structure with walls of salt that can be removed and replaced.
Inside, it’s like a grain of salt: tiny, yet powerful. The small museum is packed with information and seasoned with history – and not just salt history. The museum includes information about some of its most famous residents: Christian recording artist Chris Tomlin and aviator Wiley Post.
However, the main attraction is the city’s historical connection to the world’s most consumed, and necessary, seasoning.
Every September, the city even celebrates that history by hosting its annual Salt Festival.
King said there’s so much fascinating information it’s enough to change the way you feel about salt.
“I have a lot of people that come in and go, ‘no, no, no, I’m not going to do it,’ and then go right outside and lick that building,” King said.
For more information on The Salt Palace Museum, visit https://grandsalinesaltpalace.com.