Chapter 2: The Longleaf Pine Forest  & the Tar, Turpentine, and Lumber Industry

The founding of Pinehurst was determined not only by the topology of the Sandhills, but also by the ecology of the area and the industry that sprung up to harvest the natural vegetation, primarily the longleaf pine. 

Longleaf pine is a pine species native to the southeastern US.  The trees grow tall and straight, reaching heights of over 100 feet at maturity.  At one time, a vast longleaf pine forest stretched from Virginia into Texas.

Two of the men on Sir Walter Raleigh’s first expedition in 1584 wrote about seeing pine trees on Roanoke Island:

There are those kinds of trees which yield them [pitch, tar, rosin, and turpentine] abundantly and great store. In the very same island where we were seated, being fifteen miles of length, and five or six miles in breadth, there are few trees else but of the same kind, the whole island being full. ¹

The trees produce two types of cones: the pollen-bearing male cones and the seed-bearing female cones. They grow best in flat terrain and sandy soil that is nutrient poor.

Longleaf pines are adapted to experience periodic, low-intensity fires and these fires are necessary for longleaf forest health.  The trees need a lot of light and have thick, fire resistant bark, so fires help keep longleaf forests open by burning off shade-producing plants and shrubs.  The seeds are also unable to penetrate dense leaf litter to reach the ground, so removal of the ground cover by fire promotes germination while the ash provides valuable soil nutrients. 

From the early days of colonization, the longleaf pine forests have been harvested for timber, but they also supported a “naval stores” industry.  Tar, pitch, turpentine, and rosin are all products of pine, and the longleaf pine forests provided these essentials to merchant and naval ships. 

Tar kept ropes and sail rigging from decaying, and pitch on a boat’s sides and bottom prevented leaking. For this reason, turpentine products were called ‘naval stores’.  Turpentine was made into oil paint, which was used primarily to paint ships as well as the exteriors of buildings.

By the 1770s, North Carolina was producing 70 percent of the tar exported from the colonies and 50 percent of the turpentine.  Naval stores were the colony’s most important industry.¹

Turpentine is extracted from the longleaf pine by first cutting away the bark leaving the tree bare so the pine resin may be collected and then transferred into barrels for distilling.  

At the distillery, the resin is turned into turpentine. As the tree became stressed, the limbs were buried in tar pits or kilns and burned so the tar would ooze out and be collected for sale. Then the tree was usually felled and sent off to lumber mills.

In an interesting twist, Frederick Law Olmsted, who later became the renowned landscape architect and provided the initial design for the Village of Pinehurst, while traveling in the South and reporting for the New York Daily Times (now The New York Times) from 1852 to 1857, recorded his observations of the turpentine forests and the people in the turpentine industry in the southern states.

Longleaf pines were destroyed by the technology of the day—scoring trees caused them to “bleed” and eventually killed them. A heavily-tapped forest could be depleted and destroyed in a decade. When that happened, the industry was forced to move on to find new forests to exploit.

By the time James Walker Tufts came to North Carolina to find a suitable location for his Village, the Longleaf Forest had been decimated. What was left was a wasteland of rotting stumps and branches littering the landscape with an occasional remaining stand of longleaf pines scatted here and there. 

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References:

1. The Story of North Carolina: Naval Stores Industry in North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh NC

        Photos courtesy of the Tufts Archives, Pinehurst NC