Turpentine Blues: The Strange & Terrible Saga
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| Slash Pine Slashed For Turpentine (photo: North Carolina State University) |
I grew up in the Piney Woods. I still live in the Piney Woods (or the "Pine Belt," as the public relationists and promoters have tagged the underbelly of Mississippi). But the Piney Woods ain't quite as piney as they used to be, unless you happen to think suburban development isn't a sappy mess or wind up in the Pine Grove Treatment Center in Hattiesburg. Among other things, they specialize in sex addiction, so you might want to check in for a few rounds of golf or some heavy metal music. At $37,000 for a month and a half, it's probably no more expensive than renting a condo at Hilton Head and paying greens fees.
But that's not the point here. Or maybe it is. They cut down a bunch of trees to build the city where "Pine Grove" is. The Jefferson Starship built a city on rock and roll, but the city where rock and roll was born was built on yellow pine and turpentine.
Backstory Biology
When Europeans first arrived in North America, longleaf pine (Pinus palustris) forests encompassed millions of acres in the Deep South from Virginia to Texas. Some early explorers described the longleaf forest as "park like" with immense stands of tall, straight trees over a savannah of palmetto, bluestem grasses, and native shrubs. The longleaf pine ecosystem depends on fire, strange as it seems, and controlled burning has routinely used by foresters to manage pine forests for decades. Throughout my life, it has been common to see smoke plumes from back-set fires as the forest service and professional foresters maintain that ecosystem.
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| READ THIS BOOK! |
In a more literary vein, Janisse Ray's Ecology of a Cracker Childhood contains some of the best, nearly-poetic visions I've ever read about the Piney Woods. Her book has been compared with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, but it's a lot more. So even if you're cheap or just passing through, consider getting a copy. (As I've said before, this blog ain't monetized, so I'm not making a cent off the recommendation.)
Backstory History
Yes, the ecosystem is fragile and beautiful, but unfettered capitalism is strong and greedy, In the 19th Century, it muscled its way through the Piney Woods of the Gulf South. Back in the colonial period, British and Spanish overlords recognized the tall straight trees with their strong, rot-resistant heartwood as ideal ships' timbers.
The sticky, fragrant pine rosin, was perfect for caulking ships' timbers and preserving rope. "Naval stores" were a major part of the southern economy beginning during the colonial period. That's how the University of North Carolina "Tar Heels" sports teams got their name. Yellow pine lumber and naval stores were an essential component of the Southern economy right alongside cotton, indigo, sugar cane, rice, and Black people.
When railroads began to penetrate the region after the War of Southern Knuckleheadedness, logging began to expand to vast areas of virgin timber located farther from waterways. Dozens of sawmills sprang up along the main rail lines, The Gulf and Ship Island Railroad was one of the most effective in these parts - if denuding the landscape is the goal - as it splits the difference between the Pearl River and Chickasawhay/Pascagoula basins.
So the race was on to slash and cut the trees.
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| 1903 Map of the G&SIRR Nearly every top on the railroad had at least one sawmill. |
Nearly every stop on the G&SIRR was the site of one or more sawmills. Where there were sawmills, there were turpentine stills. The trees kept falling, the saws kept sawing, the sap kept boiling, and the trains kept moving along.
The main markets for southern yellow pine were overseas, and the railroads made it easier to move the products from the mills to the docks at Gulfport and Pascagoula. The decline of the northern white pine forests increased domestic demand as well. But all good (or bad) things come to an end.
By the 1920s, the timber boom in the Piney Woods ran out of steam. The big trees were almost all gone. Mill towns like Howison, Ten Mile, Lux, Sanford, and D'Lo dried up and blew away. But in the process, Hardy and Jones had created two cities that would enter the 21st Century as Metropolitan Statistical Areas: Gulfport, the terminus of the "Gulfport Island Road," and Hattiesburg, named after Hardy's wife. Coincidentally, both cities have a "Hardy Street" and U.S. Highway 49 ends (or begins) at Jones Park in Gulfport.
"Chip and Dip" - The Turpentine Blues
Although naval stores was considered a by-product of the timber industry - and it certainly was a smaller economic sector than lumber - it was a concurrent activity. The process of collecting rosin is inherently destructive, and trees were cut for timber after they were no longer useful for turpentine.
Trees were "boxed" during the winter with a triangular collection point chopped into the lower trunk. In the spring, the trees were "chipped" with a pattern of diagonal slashes called a "catface" hacked through the bark above the "box." Then through the late spring and summer, the hardened gum was scraped or "dipped" from these wounds and transported to a turpentine distillery.
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| Latter Day Herty System Pot (circa 1950s) |
(As a side note, Charles Herty is remembered in Georgia as much for founding the original Georgia Bulldogs varsity football team as for his work in forest products or for helping found the National Institutes of Health.)
The "Herty system" was significant because it was required less labor and extended the useful life of a tree for a few years by eliminating a deep-cut "box." The Herty system propped up the turpentine industry for a few decades, but it couldn't reverse the effects of unrestricted clear-cutting and little replanting.
As a kid, I remember seeing chipped pines and Herty pots in the woods, but the main source of turpentine by then was mostly old stumpage left over from the original timber boom. "Stump trucks" were a common sight in my hometown as they hauled ancient tree stumps to Hercules Powder Company, where they were processed into turpentine, rosin, and a variety of other volatile organic compounds. Atmospheric inversions routinely bathed the city in a fartlike miasma that people said smelled "like money."
But let's go back to the Good Old Days®...
Typically, a "crop" consisted of 10,000 trees and yielded about 150 barrels of gum annually. A barrel of crude gum produced six or seven gallons of refined turpentine, and the residue was packed into barrels where it hardened into marketable rosin.
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| A Scarred Pine "Catface" |
After two or three years, the trees would be ruined, and the turpentine operation would pack up and move elsewhere. The trees were cut for lumber, and the land was theoretically ready for conventional agriculture. (The truth is that Piney Woods dirt pretty much sucks for farming.) Replanting trees didn't become very common until the 1930s. By then, there were very few virgin stands of longleaf pine left in the Southeast.
Turpentine workers were a wild bunch, uneducated, violent, and poor, and management kept them isolated from the more upscale timber cutters and sawmill workers. Bear in mind that "upscale" in this case is extremely relative; neither logging nor turpentining was particularly lucrative.
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| More Fun Than a Barrel of Beauties |
It's no surprise, then, that turpentine operators - the guys at the top of the pile - were keen to fix prices, exempt their workers from wage-and-hour laws and mandatory benefits including Social Security, and maintain their "peculiar institution" of debt peonage. By the 1930s, they founded the American Turpentine Farmers Association to advance these goals.
The ATFA may have been predatory or benighted or the last gasp of a dinosaur, but who else could have given America the "Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine" beauty pageant? All hail!
