AND FALL RISE

By DK Knight

—Second of Three Parts—

Amajor breakthrough in the naval stores sector occurred around 1902 when University of Georgia chemist Charles Herty designed and patented the cup-and-gutter gum collection system, a big improvement over the traditional box (cavity) method. Herty’s invention was less intrusive and thus helped prolong tree life while making gum collection easier, faster, cleaner and less wasteful. Initially made of clay and later metal, the cup was suspended from a nail driven into the tree. Gum oozed into one or more metal gutters tacked to the tree at an angle, then into the cup.

Box-related tree mortality ran high and could be direct or indirect. Trees became less vigorous and more susceptible to insect attack. Writer Robert Outland noted that one forest owner lost 750,000 trees in a beetle outbreak in 1848! Another owner reported losing 130,000 the same year. Also, storms and hurricanes felled boxed trees more readily than unboxed ones.

Fire outbreaks were common and often destructive. Even though longleaf and slash pines are very tolerant of surface fire, boxes were natural flash points and were difficult to put out. Major damage or early death were often the result. Further, under pressure to meet quota, boxers at times overdid it, cutting deeper and wider than recommended.

Big Losses

Such destruction continued even after the cup-and-gutter system was introduced. According to Outland, by 1909 the turpentine industry was blamed for the loss of an estimated 37 billion BF of timber, more than 10 billion BF in Georgia alone. However, as demand for southern pine lumber increased, sawmills gradually began accepting logs from trees that had been boxed or cupped, even though the catface section was usually cut off and left behind because of rock-hard gum crystallization and the suspected presence of embedded metal.

Historical documents reveal that Georgia became the naval stores production leader by 1890, a position it held until being overtaken by Florida in 1905. Georgia reclaimed the title in 1923 and was never challenged again, leading turpentine proponents and some state legislators from the state’s southern sector to propose nicknaming Georgia the Turpentine State.

Stump Treasure

Meanwhile, lumber manufacturers and land speculators had begun competing with turpentiners for trees. Southern pine lumber, particularly from longleaf and slash, had been accepted domestically and internationally and demand was growing. Increasingly, investors bought huge tracts and installed relatively high production sawmills, opting to cut trees for more lucrative lumber rather than delay tree harvesting to extract less valuable naval stores. In so doing, these aggressive logging operations left behind millions of acres of cutover land and millions of resin-saturated stumps.

Seeing potential for this abundant resource, innovator Homer Yaryan developed steam distillation technology for processing stumps and erected plants in Brunswick, Ga. and Gulfport, Miss. to produce, among other items, a product known as ‘wood’ turpentine. Hercules Powder Co. acquired Yaryan’s company in 1920 and quickly became the world’s largest producer of naval stores, according to the U.S. Forest Service. But gum turpentine purists contended that wood turpentine was an inferior product. This could have been correct early on but by the 1930s wood turpentine plants had generally improved both the quality and quantity of their products.

Other manufacturers challenged Hercules over time. By 1953, there were some 15 wood naval stores facilities in Georgia, Florida, Mississippi and Louisiana. In 1951 alone, an estimated 2.5 million tons of stumps were processed at these plants.

Amazingly, stump extraction continues to this day, albeit on a small scale, in Florida, Alabama and Mississippi. Destination for these stumps is the plant Yaryan built at Brunswick in 1911 and today is operated by Pinova, Inc. All other stump consuming plants were shut by 2009.

Sticky Period

The early 1930s found gum naval stores operators under tremendous pressure. There was the millstone of the Great Depression, and the threat of wood turpentine/rosin manufacturing, which was much less labor intensive yet much more productive than gum operations. At the same time, the federal government had amassed a huge naval stores surplus, which was helping hold prices down. As a result, some gum turpentine operators had gone out of business, and many others were teetering.

Enter Harley Langdale, Sr., better known as Judge Langdale, leader of the Langdale family of Valdosta, Ga. Robert Outland in his book crowned the Langdale family “the world’s largest gum naval stores producer,” reporting that in the 1930s, alone or with partners, Langdale operations stretched from Georgia to North Carolina, involved almost 3 million acres, 315 crops, and 25 camps and stills. Judge Langdale headed the business, which his father, John Wesley Langdale, founded in the late 1800s.

The judge and other gum naval stores participants realized that unity could potentially galvanize gum turpentine producers into an effective force that could stabilize the industry and market.

Other attempts at uniting producers had failed, but Langdale and some 900 fellow members of the gum community created the American Turpentine Farmers Assn. (ATFA) in 1936. As a cooperative, it advocated education, advertising, research, insurance, legislation and marketing. Ultimately, it strived to demonstrate that turpentining was an agricultural process, not industrial.

Langdale and other ATFA figures successfully lobbied the federal government to increase funding for research that led to increased productivity and profitability, and to help operators secure loans from the newly formed Commodity Credit Corp. in exchange for lowering gum production. They were also able to get exemptions regarding Social Security withholding and minimum wage pay.

One important marketing achievement of the group was making turpentine available in small containers for household use. By 1959, 80% of gum turpentine was sold in bottles and cans, up from only 5% in the late 1930s. In the 1940s, ATFA produced a film about turpentine production and purchased promotional ads on national radio networks. Along the way, it created a Miss Spirits of Turpentine beauty contest, one of Judge Langdale’s pet projects. By 1955, ATFA membership had reached 4,000.

Extraordinaire

Ever the spirited turpentine evangelist, Langdale handed off management of the Langdale family business in 1937 to tirelessly promote the work of the association and to become even more of a turpentine cheerleader by extolling the medicinal virtues of the product. He seemed to believe that turpentine could cure everything from coughs and colds to sore holes.

John Lancaster, who captured the Langdale family history in a 2002 book titled Judge Harley and His Boys, included this snippet:

In an interview with an editor of a national magazine in 1955, he (Langdale) contended that workers at stills rarely caught colds and seemed highly resistant to tuberculosis, perhaps from breathing distillation vapors. He observed that workers also appeared to recover quickly from knife cuts and gunshot wounds.

Since before the time of Christ, Judge reminded his listener, the medicinal qualities of turpentine had been known. “The ancient Greeks,” he declared tongue-incheek, “recognized the healthful properties of pine tree gum. The peasant wine of Greece, called retsina, was made with a rosin base, and I have heard it said that when an old Greek died after drinking retsina all his life, it was necessary to take his stomach out and beat it to death with a stick. Rosin is an excellent preservative.”

While the ATFA and all its lobbying significantly helped gum turpentine producers, it was actually World War II’s attendant demand that rescued gum operators from oversupply and poor prices.

In the 1950s, gum turpentine production began a steady decline. Competition intensified from wood and sulfate well as new petroleum-based products. retain, and wages increased, as did production costs. All this led to the weakening and ultimate demise of gum tur- pentine harvesting and distillation. Judge Langdale stepped down as ATFA president in 1965 and some 10 years later The Langdale Co. closed its last gum still, an updated facility that used steam. ATFA quietly faded away in the mid 1990s.

Langdale would be pleased to know that at least one small town in Georgia, Portal, in Bulloch County, located some 50 miles west of Savannah, still commemorates the glory days of turpentine with an annual October festival. The town’s scant population swells considerably as visitors check out a small turpentine museum and still, which dates back to the 1930s and is reactivated for the occasion.

Interestingly, the nearby Bulloch County community of Adabelle happens to be where several families of Lumbee Indians put down roots on the ‘Turpentine Trail’ migration route. Experienced turpentiners in their heartland of Robeson County, NC, they relocated to Adabelle in the late 1800s, establishing their own community and a school, church and cemetery. The Lumbees did not follow the trail any farther, however. Some returned to North Carolina around 1920 while others stayed in Bulloch County and turned to farming.

Langdale would also be happy to know that a small volume of turpentine is still produced in the South. Diamond G Forest Products, located just outside Patterson in Pierce County, Ga., taps thousands of slash pines each year and operates an oldfashioned still. Founded about 10 years ago and farming its own trees, Diamond G initially sold most of its gum to Pinova at nearby Brunswick. Company principal Chip Griner, Jr. reports it now leases some trees and that sales (mostly on-line) for turpentine, soaps, salves, and rosin have increased so much in recent years that it now has no gum left to send to Pinova.

It’s fitting that Griner and his partners continue the turpentine tradition. His great-grandfather, O.W. Raulerson, borrowed money to enter the business in 1924 and stayed at it for 30 years.

Little remains of what once was common in the turpentine belt. A few stills are intact, at least partially, and mostly for display. Remnants of small camp houses, with their rotting wood siding and loose, rusting tin roofs, can be spotted in a few rural settings. And, if you do some research, you’ll learn about the odd landowner who lovingly holds on to some catface-scarred longleaf pines that have somehow survived. TP

(The final part of this series will be carried in May TP and will focus on labor. Note: Some information and illustrations in this article appeared in Naval Stores—A History of an Early Industry Created from the South’s Forests, James P. Barnett, U.S. Forest Service, June 2019.)