Wilmington journal. [volume] (Wilmington, N.C.) 1844-1895, 1871-01-06
The Long Leaf Pine and ahe TurpentIme
Trade -

The Long Leaf Pine and the Turpentinc
Trade. ~
! A correspondent of the Springfield Re
| publican writes from North Carolina some
interesting facts concerning the long leaf
pine of this State and the turpentine trade.
We extract a portion of the letter
The long-leaved pine is not widely scat
tered. It is to be found in the counties
OF eastern North Carolina and South Car
DINA. to some extent, also, in Georgia and
Florida. The .'North State however,
produces the great bulk of naval stores
consumed by the whole world. The tree
is yielding it's life fast to the demands that
are made upon it and will soon disappear.
1t never appears on land from which it has
once been cleared. Where forests have
stood for centuries and scattered their
seeds far and wide with every passing year,
one would expect to see the fields, once
cleared, grow up again with the same va
riety of tree. But when this pine dies, its
successor is of another variety-almost
worthless for any purpose.
| The first step III getting at the wealth of
the pine is to ''boX" the tree. In the
spring. the operator takes his axe and cuts
cavity in the tree-a deep, uplike, re-
ceptacle which will hold perhaps a quart
of fluid. Then he chips off the bark above
the cavity to the height OF two feet, more
or less, and rectifed the trunk in such
| fashion that the eXudatlons of the tree shall
| flow together into the box. Possibly he
may put four boxes in one tree-thns ''box-
ing the compass" aS completely as a sailor
This is the fast thing. Millions Of trees on
hundreds OF sq1are miles are cut in that
way, being rudely called on to ''stand
and deliver, both their money and their
life. These boxes soon fill with crude tur-
pentine. Mule carts and bull carts go
numbering through the woods and gather
up in barrels the contents of the boxes
| Then the teams are started for q market in
the neighborhood of some turpentine dis
tillery. They 60 with one barrel each, or
two, or ten, according TO the capacity of
the team, II distance of ten or twenty miles.
If they have the first yearss product of
| their trees, 1t Is virgin turpentine," and
will bring them four or five dollars bar
rel. If they have the latter years crop, it
| is "yellow dip, and will bring them some
two dollars or less per barrel. If any
curious statistician wants to find a people
| who do a vast amount of work and hard
work, fer a small amount of pay, if he
looks for class who are thoroughly justi-
fed in being poor, let him make the ao
Qualntance OF the dGnizens of the tur)en-
tine woods of Carolina.
The manufacturer who buys the crude
materirl, produces from it two staples of
commerce-splrltsO of turpentine and rosin.
The city of Wilmington is the head cen
ire of the trade In these products of the
pine. She sends out nearly million bar
rels of ro>in and some fourteen to twenty
thousand barrels of spirits OF turpen-
tine every year. An idea of the army
of people dependent on one stage or
anotEe of the business may be gained
from the fact that one still will work up
the crude turpentine produced 10y three
hundred thousand trees, emplo ying TWEEN
ty-tive to thirty men. Here is an aggre-
gate representing in round numbers the
labor of six thousand five hundred men,
and the production of sixty-fiYe millions
of trees.
These pines will bleed some eight or
ten years. from early spring till late au-
tumn. Every year the cutting of the bark
and the lacerating of the wood goes lit
tie higher than the year before, that in
some localities the scaIiied portion reach
es height of twenty feet. The boxes are
visited and the deposit of turpentine re-
moved once a week Or fortnight accord
ing to the rapidity of the flow. At the
last of the season the slowly oozing gum
hardens on the surface of the scars of the
trees and forms q kind Of coat of mail
often pearly white. and in formation re-
semblIng the stalactites OF a cave. This
last exudated is scraped from the wood,
and the trees are left to await, for little
while, the fresh hackings and decorations
OF another spring.
Tar is not dipped up in buckets from the
Tar river, nor does it run as a native ele-
ment, in the streets of Tarboro. It is
necessary to make these statements be-
cause there is probability that Mark
Twain, that distinguished topographer,
whose war map locates Paris at the juno
ton of the Rhine, the Seine and the Erie
canal, will soon publish geography of
the United States, if not of the world. I'm
less forestalled he will surely teach confid-
ing youth that tar is dipped Or pumped up
from the Tar river. Such is not the fact
The pines cannot shed all their blood.
After they have yielded all that they can
of themselves surrender to satisfy the
greed of man, there yet remains some
considerable amount OF fairness at their
hearts and about the knots. The tar
manufacturer ''goes for the last drop. He
leaves nothing.