Spirits of Turpentine

Gift of the pines

Imagine that you are an artist in your loft in, is it Paris? Milan? New York?  The late afternoon light filters through the window, and you have just dabbed the perfect shade of rose madder on your oil painting, the final touch to a masterpiece.  You hold the rose madder brush in your hand as a lock of your wavy hair falls over your eyes while you gaze. With the back of your right hand, you brush the lock away while your left reaches for a pint bottle of turpentine on the table beside your easel. With the brush in one hand, you unscrew the cap awkwardly, pour some of the liquid into a cup and swirl the rose madder brush around in it, instantly turning the liquid red.  This simple act and this liquid tie you to the wooden ships and navies of yesterday, to the destruction of the once endless pine forests of the American coastal plains, and to an industry whose workers were often only a step away from slavery.

The Found Object that suggested this scene to me is a humble clay pot. If you found it in the forests of the Florida coastal plains you might mistake it for a flowerpot, but the lack of a drain hole in the bottom should tip you off that it is not.  It is, in fact, an artifact of the turpentine industry that exploited the southern pine forests beginning in colonial times and ending in mid-20^th century, with profound ecological, economic, political, and social consequences. 

A clay Herty pot used for collecting raw oleoresin from 1902 into the 1930s.

During my long rambles monitoring my research projects in the Apalachicola National Forest in Florida, I sometimes came old pines with “cat faces”, V-shaped scars caused by the removal of bark in strips, and clay pots (or their fragments) like the one above.  These are reminders of the old turpentine (or naval stores) industry.  On a couple of occasions, I found repositories of dozens of pots and fragments in what must have been temporary storage piles.  Predictably, after the excitement of finding the first few fragments of these historic objects, I became jaded enough to collect only whole or mostly whole pots.  My collection rests near the back fence of our yard where they slowly sink into the ground and accumulate a cover of litter, making them irresistible homes for several species of ants.  I displaced several ant colonies to take the picture below. 

Herty turpentine pots I accumulated over the years of wandering the Apalachicola National Forest. It is rare to find whole pots.

The imagined scene that opened this essay could as easily have been related to perfume, soap, paper manufacture, rosin for violin bows, polishes, paints, lacquers, inks, linoleum, roofing, plastics, or pharmaceuticals, for all of these use the products derived from naval stores to various degrees.   The starting material for all these products is the oleoresin of pines, especially of longleaf pines, a sticky, viscous, odorous material that is contained within a system of ducts and canals in the wood of the pines separate from the water-conducting xylem, and exudes from wounds.  

The use of oleoresin from pines dates to ancient times in the Mediterranean region.  For most of the several millennia that humans have built wooden boats, they have used pitch or tar from pines to seal the cracks and seams against leakage.  In the USA, the industry began in colonial times to provide pitch, tar, resin, and solvents to the English navy in the era of wooden ships when hulls were caulked, ropes were tarred, and sails were coated with rosin.  By 1830, with the availability of copper stills, harvesting pine resin had grown from small farm operations to a major industry in the pine forests of the South.  Initially, slaves provided most of the labor for this labor-intensive industry, often living in the woods under the most primitive conditions, exposed to the weather and myriad discomforts.  They cut “boxes” (cavities) into the base of the pines, then cut away strips of bark so that the flow of the raw oleoresin collected in the “box”, from which it was collected with dippers, placed into barrels, and transported to the turpentine still.  There the raw resin was heated to vaporize (and steam distill) the “spirits” of turpentine, which was condensed and collected in barrels.  The non-volatile residue in the still pot (rosin), while still molten, was drained, filtered, and allowed to cool and harden in barrels. 

In 1902, Charles Herty, a professor of chemistry and future president of the American Chemical Society, introduced a less damaging and less wasteful method in which the raw oleoresin was conducted into a clay pot by metal gutters, as in the image below.  The bark was cut away in V-shaped strips, with a new strip cut every week just above the old, producing the “cat face” so characteristic of old turpentine pines and still visible today in those that survived.  The Herty pots were used until the 1930s and are now considered historical artifacts (so am I, I suppose). 

(Left) Herty pots in use. The metal gutters conduct the resin flow into the pots that are emptied approximately weekly. The catface is extended upward at about the same rate. (Right) The catface of an old pine, partly grown over.

After the Civil War, the labor for turpentining shifted largely to debt servitude (peonage), an oppressive economic system that freely invited abuse.  Turpentine camps were usually in very remote locations where workers lived and were obliged to buy everything in company stores, often on credit or company chits.  They remained in debt throughout much of their lives, in effect, becoming slaves of the turpentine operations and the banks that financed them. 

A turpentine camp in the piney woods.

Many of these laborers were black former slaves, but immigrants and poor whites were often similarly captured by this system.  Blacks especially were often arrested for minor infractions and given fines they were unable to pay.  Landowners paid the fines in return for labor, but this arrangement also clearly invited abuse of many kinds. Eventually, the southern states rented out prisoners for various types of hard labor, including turpentining. As the “renters” had no obligations to the prisoners, this system was especially prone to abuse.  Debt servitude (peonage) was finally abolished in Florida in 1923, and in the USA in the 1940s. The pots I found in the woods are reminders of both the industry and its cost in both ecological and human terms.

Naval stores products in a port, waiting to be shipped.

The output of the naval stores industry in the southern states from the 1830s to the 1960s is staggering, with exports of turpentine, resin, tar, and other products shipped all around the world.  The image above shows naval stores products in one port at one point in time.  As with many resources, over-exploitation of the pine forests gradually exhausted them, and was usually followed by logging.  Today, only about 2% of the original beautiful, open longleaf pine forest remains in anything near a natural state, replaced by agriculture, scrubby second growth or dense pine plantations.  Public awareness of its existence is dimming rapidly. 

But why do pines produce oleoresins?  First and foremost, as a defense against the depredation and damages of insects, for the resin that exudes from even small wounds is a highly viscous, sticky material full of toxic terpene compounds that easily penetrate the waxy covering of insects, poisoning them. Predictably, a host of insects, mostly beetles, have evolved countermeasures such as attacking only weakened, dying trees, or attacking in such masses as to exhaust the oleoresin secretion of the host tree. Oleoresin also prevents rot, something that is important to longleaf pines because they can live for four centuries.   The bases of branches are drenched in oleoresin so that shedding branches does not create entries for insects or rot fungus into vulnerable sapwood.  Old heartwood is also saturated with oleoresin, a condition referred to here in the South as “fatlighter” or “lightwood” on account of its flammability.  Small pieces of it will set large logs in a fireplace aflame.  Because of its rot resistance, the fatwood of a dead pine remains for many decades after the sapwood has rotted away. 

A third property makes the lighter wood particularly attractive to me as a woodworker. Wood saturated with oleoresin is somewhat translucent, a trait that has charmed me for decades.  As I work it, the heady smell fills my wood shop, and the resinous sawdust is so sticky that it forms stalactites on the underside of the saw table.  Sawn into thin sheets and illuminated from behind, this lightwood glows with the color of honey, and I found it irresistible to make several illuminated pieces of furniture and a yard light out of it. 

Thin slices of fatlighter pine glow with a honey color when illuminated from within. (Left and center) A side table; (Right) A yard light with gorilla.

There is something unfair and sad that a trait that pines evolved to deter rot and insects would be their undoing at the hands of humans, but the fact remains that their complex soup of volatile, viscous, sticky, and solid materials is a magical material that has given much to humans, but at great cost to the pines. My illuminated and other salvaged heart pine furniture is my small acknowledgement of the magic of old longleaf pines.