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Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South, by Robert B. Outland III. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2004. 352 pp. $47.95.
EARLY TRAVELERS IN THE SOUTH NEVER FAILED TO REMARK UPON THE curious and odoriferous activities of the naval stores workers they came across in the vast longleaf pine forests that stretched from Virginia to Texas. Tar burners tended their smoldering kilns day and night, and turpentine laborers chipped streaks into pine trees and carted barrels of raw gum to distilleries. The making of naval stores was a critical component of early Southern economies, especially North Carolina's, and for a traveler it seemed to be a highly visible and colorful industry.
Long before readers finish Robert Outland's engrossing Tapping the Pines: The Naval Stores Industry in the American South, however, they will be convinced that there was nothing colorful about the industry as it was developed over three centuries in the South. This industry, and especially turpentine production, played a large role in the destruction of the great pine forests of the South, and it contributed to the continuing exploitation of black workers for a century after slavery had ended. Outland's environmental and social history fills a gap in studies of the South that has long been evident.
Naval stores production, Outland reminds us, is the South's oldest industry, and, until 1920, it was the region's largest industry, together with lumber. Tar and pitch, ancient naval stores products, were essential to the maritime enterprises of many seafaring European nations, and by the eighteenth century, Southern colonies, led by North Carolina, were producing a rich supply of these products from their vast longleaf pine forests. Tar was made by burning dead wood or "lightwood" in kilns; pitch was a more concentrated form of tar made by boiling it.
But with...