Naval Stores Industry - History

History

Although these uses of pine resin ended with the passing of wooden ships, the industry remained vigorous as new products created new markets. First extensively described by Frederick Law Olmsted in his book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), the naval stores industry was one of the economic mainstays of the southeastern United States until the late 20th century. Despite a rapid decline of the gum naval stores industry in the last quarter of the 20th century, a few places in the southeastern United States still rely on it as a major part of their livelihood.

Gum naval stores cultivation refers to the labor-intensive method of extracting pine resin from the trees (the raw gum). The method of collection—tapping the trees—vaguely resembles that used on a rubber plantation or in a maple sugar grove. However, instead of preparing the tree to receive a pipe or tap, the tree is gashed with an inch-wide curved blade, called a “hack,” to remove all of the bark down through the cambium layer. An angled piece of galvanized tin is then placed below the eight-inch-long, one-inch-wide gash (also known as “the streak”) to direct the oozing sap into a quart-sized rectangular cup fixed to the tree. Each new “streak” is put onto the tree above the preceding one, and gradually a vertical “cat face” more than thirty inches in height is formed. Through the mid-twentieth century, a "puller," a type of hack that had a long handle, was used to extend the streak up the tree to a height of more than seven feet.

Once, large operators, known as “factors,” controlled huge tracts of forests, some in the hundreds of thousands of acres, which they leased to “operators,” and also advanced them capital, usually in the form of tools and other equipment and goods with which to operate. The operators satisfied their debt to the factors by returning the produce, barrels of resin. The name “Factors Walk” on the riverfront in Savannah, Georgia, commemorates an area on the Savannah River harbor where thousands of barrels of produce were collected for transshipment. Between 1880 and 1920, Savannah was the largest port for naval stores products and continued to set the world price of naval stores until 1950.