Visitors to the Munson Heritage Festival held in Northern Santa Rosa County, Florida, see a variety of craft demonstrations every October. Sugarcane is pressed for the juice and then boiled into syrup. A sawmill cuts logs into lumber, and vats of sizzling grease render pieces of pork into crispy rinds. Other attractions include an antique tractor show, an archery contest, a wildlife exhibit, and toe-tapping Bluegrass music.
Heritage festivals provide generations of participants remember the past through documents, photos, demonstrations, and artifacts. Craft or trade demonstrations instill in a visitor’s mind a deeper appreciation for the work done rather than reading about it in a book. Festivals have a positive effect on a community, or a place where people live, work, and play together.
One exhibitor I enjoy visiting is eighty-year-old chemist Raymon Melvin, who has a passion for educating the public about turpentine production. Turpentine production was a vital industry from the early 1700s until the industry declined in the 1900s. Once a year, Melvin brings to the festival his valuable collection of artifacts consisting of “hacks”—tools for stripping the bark from the longleaf pine trees, axes that cut V-shaped incisions into the tree trunks, and the different cup designs that captured the pine resin as it flowed out. Listeners are interested in learning that in 1966, Raymon found his first clay cup buried in a field while hunting on a friend’s property. This spurred a lifetime of collecting.
A selection of different designed cups to catch the flowing pine gum. All photos provided by the author.
Since both sides of Melvin’s family worked for turpentine companies during the turn of the twentieth century, he investigated how and why this industry became so important. When asked why he is so involved in this topic, he’ll reply, “I want folks to appreciate the hard work our ancestors had to endure.” Melvin found that turpentine production was one of America’s oldest, most labor-intensive, demanding industries. It relied on the longleaf pine, the most sought–after tree from the forests of North Carolina, south to Florida, and west to Louisiana. Flowing beneath its bark was a white, sticky gum or pitch from which turpentine was distilled. Early shipbuilders used this gum to waterproof rigging and hulls in their wooden vessels.1 “Naval Stores” became the collective name of all products from the resin of the pine tree.2
Different sized “hacks” to remove bark and make “cat-face” slashes.
The early turpentine industry was built on the backs of enslaved African Americans, freemen, convicts, and sharecroppers.3 Convicts labored in this industry into the twentieth century. They did the hot, dirty, dangerous work of cutting the trees, gathering the resin, building barrels, and distilling the gum. Each worker had a specific job. First, eight to twelve inches above the tree’s base, a man chopped a box-like cavity into the tree trunk to a depth of seven inches. Another worker used a hack to remove the rough bark, exposing the inner wood. He then made two adjacent, V-shaped slashes on the face that caused the tree to “bleed” gum into the boxes. The slashes resembled the whiskers on a cat and became known as “catfacing.”4
Gum flowed from V-shaped slashes into the box-like cavity.
By 1903, the turpentine industry was in decline. The box-cutting method of collecting the gum resulted in weakening the tree and causing disease. The Herty Cup, made of molded clay and developed by Dr. Charles Herty, however, eliminated the need to cut a deep cavity and saved the industry.5 Workers inserted a metal gutter-apron into the tree’s cambium so that when gum oozed to the surface, it flowed down the apron into the attached cup. As the catface dried out each week, workers cut new ones above the old to start the flow again.
Once a month, a worker transferred the resin or gum from the clay vessel into a fifty-gallon barrel. One barrel contained 300 pounds of resin which could be distilled into 75 gallons of turpentine. Workers loaded these barrels onto a wagon and hauled them to a distilling station. Here, laborers dumped the resin into a large copper kettle set inside a wood-fired still. While the resin boiled, the distillation process began.
Connected to the kettle was a worm, or copper coil, that wound through a tub of water. As the boiling progressed, steam vapor traveled into the worm, condensing into water and turpentine spirits. Lighter than water, the turpentine rose to the top and drained into fifty-gallon barrels. The thicker resin flowed into a trough, seeping through three layers of hardware cloth to catch leaves and bark. Clean resin went into barrels ready for shipment. The entire operation took two to three hours.6
A model of a still used to produce resin and turpentine.
Living in the deep longleaf forests while working in this industry was primitive, isolated, dangerous, and often destructive. Each community had an overseer who supervised the operations and the commissary. He also enforced the law. According to one source, “Little United States currency exchanged hands between the landowners and the laborers. Their payment came as tokens were traded for goods at the company store. Workers found themselves in debt to the company, and their employment was enforced until this debt was paid.”7
The demand for the longleaf tree’s resources in the early 19th century manufacturing was not unlike the demand for petroleum today. Turpentine was used in a myriad of household products: solvents, thinners for paint, and disinfectants. It was also believed to have medicinal uses. Vicks Vapor Rub still has it listed as an inactive ingredient.8
Turpentine production is no longer a significant industry in the United States because of labor costs, the introduction of steel ships that are not dependent on resin, the development of synthetic chemicals, and the depletion of the longleaf pine forests. According to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, “Taking its place is sulfate turpentine and its by-products, derived from chemical pulpinh of trees. In 2022, the top exporters were Brazil($110M) and Indonesia($70.8M).”9
Raymon Melvin, collector of turpentine production artifacts.
The production of turpentine and resin in America warrants its place among one of the longest and most productive industries in our history. Those interested in learning more about Raymon’s preservation work can visit his Facebook group. If you want to learn more about the process of turpentine extraction, visit the The Southern Forest Heritage Museum in Longleaf, Louisiana, or the Georgia Museum of Agriculture in Tifton, Georgia.
- Raymon Melvin, Personal interview, Holley, Florida, February 24, 2024
- For more on the difference between turpentine, rosin, tar, and pitch, see, “Naval Stores,” Moores Creek National Battlefield, National Park Service Pamphlet, Accessed June 28, 2024, https://www.nps.gov/mocr/learn/historyculture/upload/Naval-Stores.pdf
- For more details on how the industry involved African Americans, see Cassandra Y. Johnson and Josh McDaniel, “Turpentine Negro,” in “To Love the Wind and the Rain,” African Americans and Environmental History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 51-62, https://www.srs.fs.usda.gov/pubs/ja/ja_johnson018.pdf
- Tom Prizer, “Totems of Georgia’s Turpentiners,” The Daily Yonder, June 11, 2010.
- “The Extraordinary World of MARBL: Charles H. Herty Turpentine Cup,” Emery Libraries, Accessed June 28, 2024, https://scholarblogs.emory.edu/marbl/2013/05/21/the-extraordinary-world-of-marbl-charles-h-herty-turpentine-cup/.
- Buddy Sullivan, “Naval Stores Industry,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, August 4, 2006, and updated November 3, 2020, https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/business-economy/naval-stores-industry/.
- Matt Marino, “The Brutality of Florida’s Turpentine Industry,” FloWriter, November 9, 2018, https://flowriter.net/2018/11/09/the-brutality-of-floridas-turpentine-industry/.
- “Turpentine Oil – Uses, Side Effects, and More,” WebMD, Accessed June 28, 2024, https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-508/turpentine-oil. For more on the history of turpentine for medicinal use, see Anne Ewbank, “The Long, Strange History of Medicinal Turpentine,” Atlas Obscura, March 16, 2028, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/is-turpentine-medicine.
- “Turpentine,” The Observatory of Economic Complexity, Accessed June 28, 2024, https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/turpentine