Nizhnyaya Salda

Nizhnyaya Salda arose in 1758 when construction began on Nikita Demidov's ironworks on the Salda River. The factory settlement occupied a landscape previously inhabited by the indigenous Mansi. Workers brought to the Urals from other Russian provinces practiced household crafts as well as serving the works: they made birch-bark containers, bast shoes and clay vessels, and kept cattle and horses. The Demidovs later funded a stone Church of Saint Nicholas, begun in 1826.