Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South (review)

In 1840, Edmund Ruffin, the insightful observer of the Southern landscape, noted that the Southern longleaf pines "were deformed by being skinned for extracting turpentine" (p. 98). Robert Outland makes an intriguing claim that in a similar fashion, the development of Southern industry, the environment, and the workforce were deformed as a result of practices in the naval stores industry between 1720 to 1945.

Outland does not have a particularly focused thesis, this being primarily a descriptive work. He argues persuasively that the naval stores industry is more representative of Southern industrialism than more traditional studies of textiles, tobacco, or furniture manufacture. Although his book is firmly rooted in the field of Southern history, economic historians, labor historians, historians of technology and science, and environmental historians will all find aspects of the naval stores story that apply more broadly to their disciplines in spite of its regional characteristic. Naval stores is singularly defined as all materials used in ship construction, from hemp to masts. By 1800, the naval stores industry in the American South was focused primarily on tar and raw turpentine and their derivatives, spirits of turpentine, rosin, and pitch. Turpentine and rosin became the most lucrative by-products during the industry's quick rise and slow decline. Tapping the Pines is structured chronologically, although the technology of the turpentine industry evolved only slightly over a very long period of time.

One of Outland's more provocative observations is that the history of naval stores reflects a telling lack of technological advance. Because this was exclusively a Southern industry, he claims that it suffered from the regional lack of capital and industrial expertise. Yet, even as naval stores remained technologically backward, it was greatly affected by technological advances elsewhere. The development of superior domestic and foreign turpentine production outside of the South by using new chemical and industrial techniques placed increasing stress on the traditional naval stores industry. Concurrently, the postbellum expansion in Southern railways allowed new forest tracts to be used for "turpentining ahead of the cut."

The continued search for new forest frontiers, as the turpentine trade migrated south from its Carolina roots, speaks to a particularly destructive extraction industry. Harvesting naval stores for most of its history involved "boxing" the tree, which either killed it or greatly hastened its demise. Further destructive practices included so-called slash and burn. The result was continuous destruction of forested lands and an impoverished environment left behind. This is in sharp contrast to the French practice during the Napoleonic era that entailed the creation of a sustainable forestry and naval stores industry that was to become the great natural classroom for future American conservationists. A century later, Gifford Pinchot's U.S. Forest Service and the methods of scientific forestry began to restore some of the Southern forests, although progressive labor reforms never took hold in the piney woods.

Outland harrowingly describes the labor practices in the turpentine industry. The antebellum naval stores industry relied heavily on slaves whose working conditions were among the worst in the South. Emancipation was a myth for most of these laborers, as vagrancy laws, debtor statutes, convict leases, and other coercive measures left many of them trapped in peonage despite Progressive and New Deal initiatives. Labor practices (such as technology) changed slowly in the naval stores economy, thereby forging an unfortunate link between the old and new South.

The book's distractions include several odd grammatical lapses and sentences such as "When gone, the longleaf failed to reproduce itself . . ." (p. 98), a statement of profound biological obviousness. The few photos illustrative of the industry's arcane tools and techniques are poorly reproduced. Still, Outland's impressive research chronicles the ultimate decline of the traditional naval stores industry, the result of new technologies such as pulpwood plants and labor reforms such as the minimum wage. Within this narrative is an environmental and economic cautionary tale...