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Book Review
| Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. By Robert B. Outland III. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. xii + 352 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth $47.95.
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| Naval stores production is one of the American South's oldest industries. It is as deep-rooted in the region's culture as the piney woods themselves. Southern industrialization usually is described by historians in terms of finished goods like furniture and textiles. Robert B. Outland uses the naval stores industry to provide an alternative picture of the process. "It thus serves as a superior vehicle through which to explore several broad issues regarding the area's development both before and after the Civil War—industrial growth, the transition from slave to free labor, environmental change, twentieth-century reform efforts, changes in the rural countryside, and the extent of change from the antebellum to postbellum years" (p. 2). The industry was not a minor one in the South; in the late nineteenth century it ranked as a top five industry from North Carolina to Florida. |
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The naval stores industry involved the extraction of raw turpentine, pitch, and tar from southern pines (mainly longleaf pine) and the manufacture of derivative products like spirits of turpentine and rosin. These products originally were used to caulk or seal wooden ships, hence the name. Industry development is mapped from its colonial beginnings in North Carolina, to the antebellum turpentine boom, to the "suicidal harvest" of the South's pine forests and the emergence of scientific forestry, to a final transition from a gum-based to a wood-based industry, and eventually a chemical industry. "The demise of the gum naval stores industry in the post-World War II South ultimately represents the defeat of a poorly capitalized, technologically primitive, and labor-intensive business by a well-funded, sophisticated, and highly mechanized one" (p. 313). The context of the industrial transition is also the transition of the post-Civil War South into the New South and Outland provides fascinating depth into the everyday lives of the South's lower social classes during this period. |
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The naval stores industry was labor intensive and forest intensive. It had a harsh impact on the forest and the laborer. First, it brutally wore out the forest and then it brutally wore out the labor force. This is the story of an industry that was forced to move geographically across the South as it destroyed the forest and one that never could maintain a stable, free workforce. Chapter 1 covers the origins of the naval stores economy and describes the longleaf pine forest and its fire ecology. It illustrates the thoroughness of the book. Complicated forest ecology is succinctly described in accurate and well-documented detail. |
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The book contains ample and interesting detail on the technical aspects of the industry. Everything you ever wanted to know about turpentine operations is there: boxing, cornering, chipping, dipping, scraping, coopering, and distilling. There is an absorbing examination of living conditions, labor organization, incentives, and punishments at the turpentine camp level. The "suicidal harvest" of the longleaf pine forests is traced from the destruction of North Carolina's forests to the relocation of the industry south to Florida and west to Louisiana. Industry development is intertwined with the expansion of the railroads, the lumber industry's southward migration, the development of industry trade organizations and standards, the role of factors in financing the industry, and finally with the development of a new American wood naval stores industry. |
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