Naval Stores History, Dr

Highlighting Naval Stores History, Dr. Jan Davidson Wilmington postcard, 1909, Gift of Laura Howell Norden Schorr Naval Stores were the lifeblood of colonial and antebellum North Carolina, and they were an important part of the economy into the late 19th century. The Cape Fear region was the center of the industry. Naval Stores production helped shape the region’s population, by encouraging the dependence on enslaved people’s labor, and by creating a need for a town with merchants to market naval stores. They were a good business in a region where trees and water dominated the landscape, labor was scarce, and the land was poor. In the 18th century, North Carolina produced 70 percent of the tar, more than 50% of the turpentine, and 20% of the pitch that was exported from North America. According to one 19th century account, “Nearly the whole trade of the town [Wilmington] is derived from the produce of the pine forests. The Wharves display immense quantities of pitch and resin barrels, and stills for the manufacture of turpentine are numerous.”1This made Wilmington a rather dangerous place to live. According to one scholar, “In Wilmington, twenty distillery fires occurred from 1842 to 1853, and many fires destroyed wharves and other places where turpentine was stored. Turpentine fires sometimes incinerated an entire community. Anyone who ran a still was living a dangerous life and posed a threat to the community.”2 1 Robert Russell North America: Its Agriculture and Climate, (Edinburgh: Robert and Black, 1857), p. 158 2 Lawrence S. Earley, Looking for Longleaf: The Fall and Rise of An American Forest, (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) pp, 105-106 1 What Are Naval Stores? There are four main products that fall under the heading “naval stores:” tar, pitch, spirits of turpentine, and rosin. Naval stores producers also sold turpentine resin, which is the raw material that is used to make spirits of turpentine and rosin. In the colonial and wooden ship era, tar was used to help maintain wooden ships’ standing and running rigging. Pitch was put on the sides and bottoms of wooden ships, prevented leakage. Sprits of turpentine was an ingredient in paint and was used for medicinal purposes. Rosin didn’t have much use in the 18th century. The basic processes for collecting resin and making tar stayed the same until the 1900s. The uses for naval stores changed in the 19th century, “Spirits of turpentine became an important solvent in the growing rubber industry and an essential ingredient in a widely popular lamp oil. It was also employed in the manufacture of such diverse products as adhesives, pharmaceuticals, disinfectants, and shoe polish. Rosin was used as paper sizing and in the production of soap, floor covering, and paving material.”3 So the region goes from making tar and exporting raw turpentine gum to making and exporting spirits and rosin in much larger quantities. By the 1850s, the region was exporting as much distilled spirits as it was crude turpentine.4 Plus, the region’s changing transportation systems expand the area where tapping trees makes economic sense. In the 1850s, the Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company opened up a wide swathe of upriver forest to profitable naval stores production. This was important because river transportation was so much cheaper than over land transportation. On top of that development, Wilmington’s early embrace of the promise of the railroad also helped spread the naval stores industry. By the 1850s, there weren’t many trees in the immediate vicinity, but the naval stores business still consumed the port city. 3 Robert B. Outland II, Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (LSU 2004), p. 6 4 Outland, Tapping the Pines, p. 46 2 Tar: THE Naval Store of the 18th Century The colonial method of making tar used “lightwood”—dead tree limbs that were gathered from the floor of the forest. You made a pile of the lightwood in a pit, made a trough for the tar to flow into, covered the pile with clay or mud, set it afire, and keep it burning for a few days. Beginning on at around the 12-hour point, the tar started flowing. It was removed from the trough, put in barrels, and rolled off to market. The things you don’t need to make tar are almost as important as the “how to” make tar in explaining why it was the big export for the colonial era: First, you didn’t need a clear claim on land to pick up lightwood. This is important because our region was haphazardly settled and there were competing land claims to work through. You didn’t need lots of skills to make tar (although some are involved). You also don’t need lots of laborers to make tar—while large scale production was more profitable, a couple of guys could build a tar kiln themselves, so small and large producers went into business in the region. You also don’t need highly skilled coopers to export tar (it is sticky so it stays in the barrel). And finally, you don’t need much capital to make tar—there aren’t factories to build, or lots of fancy machinery to buy. Add to this the fact that England paid a bounty for tar, and you have some pretty compelling reasons why North Carolinians went into the tar making business in a big way. Pitch Pitch is boiled down, thicker, tar. You get about 1 barrel of pitch for 2 barrels of tar. There was some colonial pitch making, in part because pitch is cheaper to export than tar because the transportation costs are lower. But England discouraged the colonial manufacture of pitch and paid more in their bounty for tar. Spirits of turpentine Raw pine resin (sometimes called sap, but it is not technically sap. It is also sometimes called gum) is a sticky substance, and can be sold as is, by placing it into a relatively poorly made barrel. But distilling the raw pine tree resin makes spirits of turpentine. Spirits of turpentine are produced using a still, very much like making moonshine. Rosin (not the same as resin!) You also get rosin when you distill the raw gum into spirits of turpentine. Rosin comes out of the still as a liquid, but turns into a hard substance. 3 How To Tap A Tree: Postcard, 1907, Gift of Teresa Sheehan To get the raw turpentine resin, you have to extract it from the tree by “tapping” it. There are a number of processes involved: boxing, cornering, chipping, scraping, and dipping. Workers “boxed” a tree by cutting a cup into the trunk of the tree near the base. This was the receptacle for the resin. Boxing could be – and usually was – done in the winter. In the Spring, the box was cornered. Cornering involved making the first cut that would guide the resin into the box. This needed to be done well to guide the precious first run resin into the box. After the cornering, workers chipped a 1-inch line on each side of the corner about once a week to keep resin flowing toward the box. When the face got to shoulder height, workers needed to use a “puller” (a tool with a long handle) to chip the tree face. When the box was full, workers dipped, using a specialized tool, to collect the resin. Dipping usually happened between 4 and 7 times a season. When a tree had been chipped so often that the resin and the box were far apart and the quality of the turpentine was degraded, and at the end of the season, workers used a tool to scrape the resin off the cut surface of the tree. This was known as “scrape” and was sold for less money. Before the Civil War, the vast majority of naval stores workers in North Carolina were enslaved men. The profits to be made in large scale turpentine extraction meant slavery was critical to the region’s economy, and helped make slavery deeply embedded into the fabric of life in the county and city. 4 .

Load more