disintegrated, its liquid remains drained into catchments; workers col-
lected the muck and, with little processing or cleaning, poured it into bar-
rels—the making of which, incidentally, enormously enlarged a cooperage
trade and business already devoted to tobacco hogsheads and brandy casks.
One of the reasons for the instability of the American naval stores business
was the vagaries of demand, particularly from the British. Another was the
recurring complaint that American tar and pitch were bad—trashy, incon-
sistent in viscosity, and spoiled from over-long storage in hot sun. Scan-
dinavians may have been independent of British control and thus a na-
tional security worry, but they made good naval stores and were much less
wasteful.
After American independence, tar and pitch production persisted, albeit
mostly on the unreliable national market. It was a new pine product, also
diffused from European ingenuity, that revolutionized the industry. This
was turpentine. By the s and s, turpentine had become an early,
hugely successful commercial medicinal. It was used as an external anal-
gesic, taken orally for a host of complaints, and employed as an enema.
Turpentine also became an illuminating fuel, set to rival whale oil, and
an industrial chemical with ever-multiplying uses—for example, in paint
manufacturing. Carolina entrepreneurs rose to the demand and in a gen-
eration radically altered the coastal countryside.^9
Like Virginia’s tidewater, eastern North Carolina possessed a few strands
of rich earth along tidal rivers that attracted planters and built wealth on
slavery. For the most part, though, soils there are sandy and acidic, and the
forest cover is predominantly, often exclusively, conifers—sure signs of not-
good farming country. It was turpentining that converted such a country-
side into something very much like plantations. By the s, enterpris-
ing capitalists with slaves (owned and/or leased) bought up or leased the
vast ‘‘groves’’ (also called ‘‘orchards’’) of longleaf pines between the coast
and fall line. White and sometimes black riding bosses supervised hun-
dreds of slaves, overwhelmingly men, in the boxing of tree trunks and col-
lection of dripping resin. Conventionally, a mature tree was to be tapped
via two boxes, which were chevron-shaped cuts first made fairly close to
ground level. Crude, portable distilleries, operated usually by white jour-
neymen, followed the progress of the harvest. Markets were almost con-
sistently good, prices were rising, and turpentine men could resist neither
new technology, such as larger, more efficient, and stationary stills nor ex-
tending the slashing of bark from two to four or more boxes.
Throughout the s, travelers such as William Cullen Bryant and a
avery
(avery)
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