TURPENTINE AND TWO OTHER SAPS

In April of 2001, I was asked to leave the advertising agency where I had worked for

twenty-five years. The parting had been coming for some time, since the company had merged with or been bought by, depending on your point of view, a French concern. The inevitable changes from new leadership meant that a number of long time employees found themselves no longer part of the corporate future. In truth, this brought me no great sadness. I was ready to move on and had for some time contemplated a second career in teaching at the college level. Before entering the corporate world, I received a PhD in history and now I felt it was time to explore the academic world that had been my original career goal. So, after a relatively quick search of available positions, I found myself in the dead of winter of 2002 commuting to Muncie, Indiana to begin my career as an assistant professor of advertising at Ball State University.

Second careers can certainly work out. Regrettably, mine did not. Within about a month and half, it was clear that I had made the right decision a quarter century before when I chose to leave the academic world. Most importantly, I rediscovered that what I liked about the pursuit of learning was not so much teaching, as research. During the last few years of my advertising career, I had in my spare time written a centennial book for the Episcopal church that my wife and family and I had attended for many years. As teaching became a burden, I decided I needed another writing project, one that would fulfill my enjoyment in research and the hunt for new knowledge.

The commute to Muncie was one of the practical reasons that my teaching career foundered. It was a roughly four-hour drive over one of two alternate routes. The all highway route heads through Chicago to interstate 65 all the way to Indianapolis where you hook up with I69 and head north to Muncie. The local option follows 65 south to Lafayette and then takes a two lane state road across the center of Indiana directly to Muncie. The difference in time is insignificant. The difference in attitude is immense. The highway is very focused, the local road is contemplative. Usually I took the highway to Muncie and the local route home.

So it was that I found myself in the middle of Indiana convinced of my need to end my short foray into teaching but knowing that I needed a project, a research topic that might even lead to something that I could write and people might be interested to read. It was a late Thursday afternoon and strangely enough you can listen to NPR as you cross the surprisingly rural landscape of central Indiana. As I found the station, I heard singing that was a cross between blues and gospel. They were songs unlike anything I had heard before talking about working in the forests of the southern United States. It was a segment on “All Things Considered” titled “The Sounds of 1930s Florida Folk Life.” The host came on to explain that in the 30’s “teams of archivists hauled a massive portable disc recorder across Florida to record regional folksongs in many languages including blues and work songs from fisherman, railroad gangs and turpentine camps, workers who turned pine sap into turpentine.”

Pine sap into turpentine. It had never occurred to me that turpentine came from pine sap. In fact, it had never occurred to me that anything good came from pine sap, which I had spent considerable time removing from various cars that had been inadvertently parked under pine trees. Was it possible that there was a unique world hidden away within an industry that I had never even realized existed. It seemed a worthy topic for research, so as my teaching efforts ran down, my search for the story of turpentine began.

Over the years my encounters with turpentine have been in the form of the tin container kept on a workbench to clean up after painting. I build model boats and am a messy painter, so the product has come in handy through the years. In fact, I have used the terms turpentine and paint thinner interchangeably which at a scientific level is perhaps incorrect but at a practical level understandable. My first forays into the history of the product showed that far from being the hero of the tale, turpentine was for many years the least useful member of an important, if now virtually forgotten group of products, called Naval Stores.

The term Naval Stores refers to products that were an essential part of the world of wooden ships, including tar, pitch, masts, and spars. It encompasses anything related to the procurement and subsequent protection of wood used on the high seas. From the earliest expansion of oceanic seafaring until the development of first copper sheathing for the bottom of ships and eventually steel hulled vessels, the wooden hull was protected by being covered with tar and pitch. With the largest navy in the world, the British were the dominant consumers of pitch and tar. Until the commercial opening of the new world colonies, the source was almost exclusively Sweden. The Swedish Tar Trading Company was established in 1648 and for many years held a virtual monopoly on the worldwide trade. As monopolists tend to do, it raised prices aggressively and the seafaring European nations were encouraged to find alternative sources. As luck would have it, the British were involved at this very time in developing colonies in North America, which turned out to offer a perfect environment for Naval Stores.

The story now jumps to the southern United States. Specifically, we first turn to North Carolina, which stood at the entrance to an incredible forest of virgin long leaf pine, the raw material of the Naval Stores industry. In its original expanse, the Southern pine forest started in Virginia and spread south and west all the way to Texas. In total it covered some 130 million acres. Out of this forest came a steady flow of pitch and tar and then, as its uses multiplied in an increasingly industrialized world, turpentine. North Carolina was the center and with the industry gaining importance became the Tar Heel state. As one historian noted, “The Carolina economy was as suited to the naval stores trade as New England was suited to commerce. The climate was favorable. Trees could be prepared quickly and easily for pitch and tar distillation in the warm climate: turpentine could be ‘run’ from April at least to September. And with the introduction of negro slaves, a labor force was available.”

Naval stores was a true extractive industry. The forest could support the work for ten to twelve years before the virgin long leaf trees died off and were replaced by an inferior pine describes as “rapid growth and of little value.” The producers and their work force, moved consistently to the south and west following the sweep of virgin forest into Florida and Georgia. They left behind an infrastructure of plank roads and railroads to nowhere. As contemporary travelers noted, the forest had been consumed.

In 1864 when I first went over the railroad from Savannah to Thomasville there was an almost unbroken forest of magnificent pines…through which the railway cut its way like a ditch- but now one may go over that same route and scarcely see merchantable pine. From most of the visible land the timber is entirely gone and the same state of things prevails in much of the piney woods.”

Washington Wingate, another observant traveler in the area, was even more poetic.

But how they do bleed the poor pines to pay for it. They show their white faces around you on every side a great way up, and at night as you ride along they look for all the world like a great army of specters ready to pounce upon you on every side and bear you away…Unfeeling masters thus to exhaust the liberal tree until she can give no more, and then repay her by a burning.

White faces in the forest, trees bled and then burned, perhaps we are getting ahead of the story and need to understand a little about the actual production of turpentine. The long leaf pine that covered much of the southeast United States provided two basic products, turpentine and tar. Turpentine came from taping the tree by cutting a box or face that allowed resin to run down into a cup. The resin was gathered and then distilled, into spirits of turpentine in a process similar to making whiskey. Tar was made from “lightwood” which was the heart of a dead pine. Fragments of the dead trees were gathered, made into a kiln covered with earth and subjected to a slow fire, which forced out the resinous matter. Pitch was a concentration of tar. In the early days of the industry it was pitch and tar that were most highly desired with turpentine a second-class citizen. With the change in hull construction in shipbuilding, demand for these products diminished while turpentine found new uses first as a substitute for whale oil in illumination and then as a solvent in the growing rubber industry. Over time, turpentine usage evolved so that by the early twentieth century, 80% found its way into the manufacture and thinning of paints and varnishes with the remainder in shoe polish.

I was drawn to the study of turpentine because of the reference to turpentine camps. These camps were the product of the forces that shaped the labor relations of the industry. The woods were deep, the trees were tapped and left exhausted and the work was hard. This led to a unique world hidden away in the trees. In this world men did the essential work of turpentining, cutting boxes into trees, gathering the sap that ran into cups, emptying myriad cups into barrels and dragging these barrels to the nearest road or railroad to be transferred to merchants in Savannah or Charleston who sold the product on to the world.

In the earliest days of turpentining, slaves worked the trees. Large plantation owners saw that there was money in naval stores and pushed the independent white “piney woods” people out and set up large scale operations patterned on plantation agriculture. Slaves were given tasks and monitored by white overseers. The work was exhausting but there was a certain level of freedom for the individual slave since workers fanned out into the trees and were left largely alone if they made their quotas.

Turpentine producers believed that their slaves preferred task work in the forest over gang labor in agriculture. One remarked that no set of hands have ever been known to willingly leave it and go back to cotton.

This comment may say more about the normal conditions for a plantation slave than the joys turpentine work. As slavery ended and the conditions of plantation work changed, turpentine producers found it more and more difficult to hold onto workers. By the 1870-1880s, the pressure on profits, the need to increase labor productivity and the exhaustion of the trees that led the industry deeper and deeper into the forest, brought on a labor crisis. One Florida manager summed up the problem.

Turpentine work is severe to degree almost impossible to exaggerate, and it is very difficult to control a sufficient quantity of free labor to properly cultivate any great number of trees.

Faced with a loss of labor and growing demand for turpentine as industry expanded its usage, the owners had to adopt new methods. They could have innovated. They could have increased wages to attract workers. Regrettably, they took another course, fueled perhaps by the racial divide between white owners and largely black workers. They turned to coercion sanctioned by the state.

At the end of the Civil War, there were an estimated 3000 workers in the turpentine camps of the south. By the turn of the century there were 41,000 workers in an industry that was centered in the forests of southeast Georgia and northern Florida. This exploding labor force was overwhelmingly comprised of black former agricultural workers who were enticed by a change from the routines of sharecropping and the false promise of real wages. As one historian explained the challenge.

Some men liked it, for the smell of the gum and for the solitude, but for the most part, anyone with enough love and food in his life wouldn’t choose turpentining as a career, if he was free to choose, which most men were not. It was a hard, dirty line of work to follow, said to be the hardest and dirtiest in the world… the job was so low ranking and after a month in the woods boxing and hacking and pulling, all were dusky and wooly-headed from resin and dirt.

The labor system that came to dominate the turpentine industry was characterized by a form of forced labor maintained by an elaborate system of debt peonage and the threat of physical violence. The turpentine operators, like most of the leaders of southern rural industries, believed like their slave holding grandfathers that they owned their black workers. To legalize this labor system, at least at the state level, legislatures were lobbied to pass laws making it a misdemeanor to accept “money and other personal property” through agreement to perform services and to subsequently abandon “the source of said employer without just cause.” The law provided a penalty of a fine or imprisonment of up to one year for walking off the job if the employee owed a debt to his employer. Workers were essentially at the mercy of the employers who kept the books. The state backed the employer and the free black had now become a virtual slave, living and working sometimes for multiple generations in turpentine camps deep in the forest. As one historian summed it up.

By 1901 Southern society had reached the point where a debt-labor system characterized by violence and the corruption or acquiescence of local police officers was openly tolerated. In a sector of the country characterized by illiteracy and poverty, vulnerable victims were in profusion, and most of the peons were black.

Turpentine camps were self-contained worlds hidden away in the pines miles from the nearest town. These camps were constructed and owned by the companies and included housing for workers and supervisors, a fire still for distilling turpentine, a rudimentary school and church and the key economic element, the company store. Turpentine workers were typically advanced money either to come to a specific camp or for their on-going purchases. Little cash changed hands and the worker was constantly in debt. The camp owners used this system to increase their profits by inflating commissary prices. There was virtually no way for the worker to escape the system since they rarely understood the accounting and they had no one to turn to with complaints.

Camp life revolved totally around the exhausting work of chipping trees, gathering sap and distilling turpentine. The workday was dawn to dusk and production was monitored by a preassigned task system and white “woodsriders.” As sons following their fathers into the same industry, there developed a subculture of the black rural worker. A social historian of the south described the situation.

Over the years the turpentine negroes evolved a distinct society, rarely communicating with others except those of their own specialty. Negroes employed in agriculture, sawmills and other occupation were conscious of the distinction between themselves and men who worked the pine trees, and usually sought little contact with them.

A curious twist to the turpentine story is that an industry that was so backward and coercive in its labor relations strove mightily to promote its product in a very modern way. In the late 1930s the industry introduced the small tin container of turpentine. Until that point, consumers had to bring a bucket to a store and draw their turpentine from a large barrel. Under the auspices of the American Turpentine Farmer’s Association Cooperative, the industry began to market this consumer friendly packaging to convince “housewives, home builders and the little man” that everyone needed a tin of paint thinner. At the annual convention in 1937, the association president rallied the troops by extolling the superiority of gum turpentine saying that every consumer must be told this story. “And I know of only one way to do that, advertise, advertise, advertise and then advertise some more.” Music to the ear of a former adman, which led to a national radio advertising campaign.

From the great fragrant pine forests of the romantic south comes pure gum spirits of turpentine. The product is refined from the sap of the living pine trees, and it is called the Universal Household Cleaner. Keep a container of gum spirits of turpentine handy at all times. You’ll use it to clean paint brushes and remove paint spots from any surface. Besides that, it is a great help in cleaning tile floors and all porcelain fixtures in the bathroom.

The association even sponsored a Miss Spirits of Turpentine beauty pageant, which generated a calendar with bathing suit beauties posing besides newly chipped pine trees.

The advertising was careful to emphasize “gum spirits” because the turpentine industry in the late 1930’s was under siege from two directions. On the one hand, technological innovation was bringing into prominence a whole new way of producing turpentine. On the other, a humanitarian push aimed to free the turpentine worker from his debt-burdened world.

The destructive process of extracting turpentine left a swath of dead trees across the pine forests. As these trees were harvested for lumber, the forest turned into a sea of tree stumps. Starting in the early 20^th century, experimental plants began to use these stumps as the raw material for a new process of extracting turpentine and thus was born the distinction between wood and gum naval stores. At first the wood stores factories produced a low grade turpentine product but, over time, by applying chemical and engineering advancements, the quality of the product improved to where it was a strong competitor to traditional gum turpentine.

The wood naval stores industry also changed the business and labor model for producing turpentine. The scattered camps with almost feudal control of a black underclass labor force were supplanted by a highly mechanized and technologically advanced production process explained by an industry spokesman in the 1930s.

Harvesting stumps for the steam distillation process was a highly mechanized operation in contrast to the hand labor used by the gum industry. The stumps were pushed from the ground by bulldozers, loaded onto trucks by mechanized loaders and hauled to rail shipping points or directly to plants. At the plants, the wood was chipped, shredded and subjected to solvent extraction. Then the extract was steam-distilled to obtain rosin, wood turpentine and other minor naval stores products.

The developments in the wood naval stores industry threatened the traditional turpentine industry by modernizing the production process. A concurrent attack was launched at the archaic labor system of the gum turpentine sector. It is interesting that this attack came first not because of the exploitation of the black labor force but as an outgrowth of an experiment to use immigrant labor in Florida turpentine camps. In the early 20^th century, the growing demand for turpentine led to labor shortages in the camps especially in the newly opened forests of northern Florida. To fill this demand, turpentine operators turned to agents who gathered immigrant workers in New York City with the promise of employment in the turpentine industry. Workers were charged for the transportation to Florida and found themselves thrown into turpentine camps already in debt and with little prospect of earning enough to regain their freedom. As a contemporary observer explained the plight of the indebted worker:

If a laborer quit his employer and boarded a passing freight train, he was at once arrested. If he remained in the area after quitting, he was taken into custody as a vagrant. If he tried to leave on foot, he was arrested as a suspicious character. In each case he would be fined and if unable to pay he was leased as a convict back to the same operation.

Reports of the forced labor and brutality of the system began to filter back to New York. Into this world stepped a most interesting historical charactes, a reformer named Mary Grace Quackenbos. Mary Grace was a middle class reform minded crusader with ties to the Italian immigrant community who had already established a People’s Law Firm in Manhattan to help immigrants. She had legal training and enough money of her own to undertake a personal investigation of the conditions among immigrants in the turpentine camps. Using her maiden name and posing as a reporter for a popular magazine, she went to Florida and began to poke around not only into the immigrant situation but also, the oppressive labor conditions of the predominantly black labor force. She returned to New York and contacted the U.S. Department of Justice, which quite surprisingly appointed her a special assistant United States attorney, the first woman ever to hold such a position. With this new official appointment, she returned to Florida to expose and eventually prosecute peonage cases.

As one might expect, the arrival of northern social crusaders, especially led by a woman, did not thrill the Florida industrial leaders. A local newspaper editorial highlighted the deep racial divide as Quakenbos’ crusade moved from immigrants, who could always be simply shipped back north, and the resident black labor force.

She is doubtless an honest, well-meaning woman, she is probably a confirmed sentimentalist on the negro question, and that means that she has precious little common sense on the subject. Employers of negro labor in the south are constantly encountering difficulties of the most exasperating character because of the chronic unreliability of that labor and the perfectly conscious less facility with which it makes contracts, secures valuable advances and then “jumps the job.”

Quackenbos continued to push for prosecution of the most egregious cases of debt peonage. The Turpentine Operators Association and the United Grocer’s Company, which supplied turpentine camp commissaries, allied to support the industry against her crusade charging that the whole issue “was nothing more than slanderous assaults by unfriendly outsiders and another case of federal interference in the state.” The outcome was an early example of the pattern that would become notorious during the civil rights trials of the 1960s, federal prosecutions in front of southern juries who had no intention of convicting white men for what they did to black men. Overtime, however, the pure defense of racial stereotyping broke down and Quakenbos and her team were successful in gaining some show case convictions.

Social crusaders and industrial innovators combined to signal the death knell of the traditional turpentine business. The forests were exhausted, the workers were exploited and the industry was moving on. Far from a quick death, it was the slow erosion of irrelevancy. Small, family run operations replaced the turpentine camps. The Miss Spirits of Turpentine beauty pageant was held until 1975 when it became the Miss Georgia Forestry Queen. The last bucket of commercial turpentine was dipped in the summer of 2001 in rural Georgia. And now, if you search the internet for information on gum turpentine you end up with Gillis Carter of Willacooche Georgia who works four trees the traditional way in this his front yard. Gillis is a true believer:

I reckon next to my love of the Lord Jesus, I just love turpentining. Not that I know any more than anybody else about it, but I was raised up in it, and it was my Daddy’s livelihood all of his life. And I just grew a fondness for it, and I just wanted to cut those trees out there and chip them for people that passes this highway out there, that they might stop and show it to their kids.

No historian can look at the history of the turpentine industry in the United States without raising the question of whether the exploitation of one of nature’s gifts and a distinct group of people is a uniquely American story, or if there are similar episodes in other places and times. This question can begin to be answered by turning to Africa where a rubber boom was brought on by the rise of the automobile. The story, which features a Belgian King exploiting the native population, has a suprising number of parallels.

The first, and most fundamental parallel is that rubber is coagulated sap and the sap had to gathered in the forest. The sap came from vines that wound around trees that were tapped in a process similar to the turpentine methods. Workers had to go deep into the forest but in this case the Belgians were fortunate to find already existing villages that could be forced to provide a rubber quota. The intellectual basis for the exploitation was very similar to that used in the U.S.: the workers were inherently lazy and only a coercive system would get them to do the necessary work. The Belgians took it a step further by overlaying the notion of a civilizing effect on backward natives as a support for a system which became at first, extremely violent, and finally, almost genocidal.

The parallels between turpentine and rubber are really quite striking. Both exploited the forest and just as turpentine faced the competition from wood derivative products, wild rubber faced the innovation of plantation grown rubber trees. And in the final similarity, both had their labor systems unmasked by intrepid reformers. In the case of rubber, it was a clerk in an English shipping company whose curiosity and access to cost and sales figures led him to calculate that the Belgian government could not be making a profit and paying its labor force. The natives were clearly working as slaves. Just as with turpentine, the combined forces of alternative, more industrialized methods of production and reforming zeal brought an end to a backward, exploitative enterprise.

Indeed, it is almost as if sap is the culprit. This natural product of trees that was essential to a modernizing world either as turpentine or rubber led men deep into the forest and eventually fostered a coercive labor system on two continents. Maybe there was something inherent in combination of trees and industry that was malevolent. But my growing image of sap as a villain could not stand up to a breakfast with my grandchildren. My wife placed a plate of pancakes all ready to be eaten in front of our granddaughter, Mattelyn. She reached for the pure maple syrup bottle to add even more, and asked me where maple syrup came from. And with that question, I left the oppressive stories of turpentine and rubber to enter the idyllic world of maple sap.

And here, I must reveal my archaic research process since my search for information began not on the Internet but at my local library. And when you review the catalogue, regrettably no longer a real card catalogue, you find that there are two books on maple syrup, both housed in that center of research, the children’s room. And right away, it is clear that sap is not evil. In Ann Purnell’s lovingly illustrated “Maple Syrup Season” the multigenerational family can’t wait to get out into the forest as spring brings the cold nights and warm days that signal the start of maple sap season.

It is time the Brockwell family comes together to make maple syrup. “Sap rising” Grandpa drills a hole and hammers in the spout. He hands a bucket. Soon the first plunk of sap hits the metal bottom. “Sap’s rising.” Grandpa shouts. The family cheers and claps mittened hands.

As I search the library for more information, the trail shifts from the children’s room to books on the back to nature food movement. Among the chapters on heritage vegetables and free-range animals are odes to the joys of maple sugaring.

In Vermont, a day comes in early spring when the sun flares bright and the air smells of earth once again. The snow turns from diamond dust to taffy and the land relaxes. From up and down the hills- shy at first, then insistent-comes the tink, tink, tink of shiny drops falling into tin baskets. Doctor, come quick: the patient has a pulse.

Maple trees and their flavorful sap restored my faith in nature. Even with almost two million trees being tapped across the northeast United States and eastern Canada, the industry was idyllic. Perhaps it was the short season, or the sugary output or the warm cozy sugarhouse where the sap was concentrated down to syrup in an atmosphere that one writer describes as “like ice fishing, very conducive to convivial drinking.” Or maybe there was even an industrial angle since the major innovation in the maple groves had been the network of plastic tubing attached to a vacuum pump that gently drew the sap down from its hillside spigots to a central collection area. Whatever the reason, I had found an uplifting sap story and perhaps a reason to bring my research to an end.

That is until I went to my grandchildren’s Christmas pageant. My grandson Connor came down the aisle dressed as a shepherd. With the other little shepherds he turned to watch the Three Wise Men deliver their gifts of gold, frankinsense and myrhh. The gifts were a precious metal and two “aromatic resins obtained from trees of the genus Boswellia used in incense and perfumes.” It makes me wonder what kind of story these saps might tell. But that is best left for another day.

Thank you.