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Reviews
| Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South. By Robert B. Outland III. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 2004. xii+352 pp., tables, illus., maps, notes, bibl., index. $47.95 hb (ISBN 0-8071-2981-X).
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Historians and travelers who ponder the geography of industry in the American South probably conceive of it in terms of I-85. That interstate, which links Richmond, Durham, Charlotte, Spartanburg, and Atlanta, now serves a vibrant area that includes automobile manufacturers, chemical industries, software firms, and other representations of Southern modernity. During the late-19th century, countless small towns, mill villages, and rail spurs arose in this same corridor to serve the tobacco and textile industries emblematic of the era's "New South" notion of Southern industrialization.
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Tapping the Pines presents an alternative geography of Southern industrialization. According to Robert B. Outland, a more significant tale can be found in the piney woods of the eastern Carolinas, South Georgia, and North Florida, center of the mostly forgotten naval stores industry. Those sparsely populated areas, now traversed by I-95, I-10, and hundreds of more remote roadways, were once home to an industry that ranked in the top-five for each of these states. Outland persuasively suggests that the naval stores industry, with a legacy of poor capitalization, resource extraction, environmental devastation, and exploitation of African American labor, serves as a more informative example of Southern industrialization than more celebrated tales of Southern progress.
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Tapping the Pines is a comprehensive and well-researched survey of the naval stores business since colonial times, with an emphasis on its intersections with social and environmental history. The industry's origins can be traced to 1608 when British policymakers pressured colonists to help secure the forest products and byproducts that were already scarce in England. North America's vast stands of longleaf pine became an ideal source for the tar and pitch used to keep the British navy sailing and a model for the mercantilist economy as a whole
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Those parameters changed following the Revolutionary War, but Americans consumers also found many valuable industrial products in the longleaf pines of North Carolina. Outland stresses that demand for naval stores steadily increased in the 19th century. Americans used tar for greasing axles and curing wounds; pitch for treating lumber, rosin in soaps, and in sizing paper; and spirits of turpentine as a medicine, a solvent, a waterproofing agent, and an ingredient in lamp oil, shoe polish, and more. Steady demand for naval stores brought an inexorable and unabated devastation to the Southern forests. After enduring repeated and brutal harvests for their resin, trees became susceptible to hurricanes, insects, fire, and disease. As the deforestation continued, the center of industry moved steadily from North Carolina to South Carolina, to Georgia, and to Florida, consuming virtually every old-growth specimen of longleaf pine in its path.
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Outland devotes considerable attention to the history of labor in the naval stores industry. In the antebellum period, slaves who worked in the forests endured conditions that may have been more oppressive than those on a cotton plantation. Turpentine work meant monotony, cruelty, primitive and impermanent housing conditions, simple and inadequate diets, isolation from family and community, and working conditions that routinely exposed workers to toxic chemicals, snakes, mosquitoes, and other hazards of the forest. Moreover, since 85% of the slaves in this industry were leased from their owners, the managers who supervised them lacked an owner's interest in a slave's survival.
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Without new capitalization, new technologies, or new regulations, the industry failed to modernize in the postbellum era. Forced labor and harsh conditions for the overwhelmingly African American and male workforce continued long after slave emancipation. Turpentine producers used vagrancy laws, wages paid in scrip valid only at the company commissary, the isolation of the camps, and sheer brutality to keep workers under their thumbs. Debt peonage and leased convicts added another dimension, as local officials became ever more complicit in the shameless exploitation of the workforce. Although convicts made up less than 10% of the workforce, most of the African Americans in this industry were there against their wills.
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Outsiders finally began to make an impact on the industry in the 20th century. Progressive Era journalists exposed the crimes of debt peonage and convict labor (although the practices did not vanish for another three decades). Professional foresters introduced less destructive methods of harvesting resin. Opportunities in northern cities lured thousands of African Americans from the forests. By the 1930s, industry leaders came to rely on the federal government for help, as New Deal policies offered landowners price supports and the chance to pull lands out of production. The industry became obsolete soon after World War II. New methods to extract forest byproducts, minimum wage laws, and other changes caused producers and workers to leave the industry in droves. Today, only one facility that processes gum naval stores remains (it is in Baxley, Georgia, and was a tour stop at SIA's 1999 annual meeting).
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In all, Outland makes a powerful case that this forgotten trade can be called a "prototypical Southern industry." No celebratory narrative, Tapping the Pines persuasively demonstrates that some of aspects of the Old South—environmental degradation, African American poverty, and oppression of the working class—did not disappear in the New South, and their legacies remain apparent today.
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| For those interested in this topic, two other recent works can be recommended as useful complements: Carroll Butler's Treasures of the Longleaf Pines: Naval Stores (Tarkel, 1998) offers an informal but informative survey of the industry, with a strong emphasis on the tools and techniques of the trade. Lawrence Earley's Looking for Longleaf: The Rise and Fall of an American Forest (University of North Carolina Press, 2004) offers a sympathetic ecological history of a tree vital in the American past but hard to find today. Thanks to these works, and especially thanks to Outland's rich, thorough, and scholarly study of the industry itself, the history of the naval stores industry has been rehabilitated. |
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