A Turpentine Tale
The Self-Destructing Industry
1743 - 1930

"These poets of the swinging blade! The brief, but definately graceful, dance of body and axe-head as it lifts over the head in a fluid arc, dances in the air and rushes down to bite into the tree, all in beauty. where the logs march into the mill with its smokestacks disputing with the elements, its boiler room reddening the sky, and its circular saw screaming arrogantly as it attacks the tree like a lion making its kill.  The log on the carriage coming to the saw.  A growling grumble.  Then contact! Yeelld-u-uow! And a board is laid shinning on a new pile.  All day, all night.  Rumble, thunder and grumble.  Yee-ee-ow! Sweating black bodies, muscled like gods, working to feed the hunger of the great tooth."

~Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Track on a Road 

In several instances in Volusia County's history, timbering has been carried to an extreme,  beginning with the early Spaniards.

The first export of Florida Timber was recorded in 1743. Two masts of yellow pine, each eighty-four feet long, these were shipped to Havana.  The Spanish without the capitalistic edge of the British failed to recognize the importance of this industry.  While the Spanish used logs and timber for homes, fortification, and plank roads, they did recognize the potential for building naval stores of rosin, tar, pitch and turpentine, but they did little. 

In 1763, the British began to tap the products of the virgin forest.  By 1782 fifty thousand barrels of tar, rosin, pitch and turpentine were extracted from the areas surrounding the St. Johns River. Lumbering established during the last few years of the British Period continued to flourish for a time after the Spanish regained Florida in 1783.  

When Florida became an American territory in 1821 exploitation of the virgin forest resumed, and most of the virgin forest were cut over the next 80 years. Commercial exploitation, not conservation, was the method of operations of the day.

Post Antebellum & Reconstruction

Debt peonage of the turpentine black, carried an attitude that was not ordinary to men.  What kind of man was content, or willing, to work twelve hours a day under primitive circumstances?  He was mostly alone, but checked by the woods rider on his horse, he spend two thirds of his time just walking.  He led a simple uncomplicated life, some even say happy in complete ignorance, secure in the knowledge that the commissary in camp provided credit, that the "Boss Man" understood him and that the only law he need observe was that of the camp.  Far enough from the sheriff and jail, he lived in a miserable cabin with clapboard shutters over glassless windows to shut out the weather, this was provided for him, his woman and his children. 

The woods are silent now and have been for decades.  Where once they rang with the half cry, half shout of the lonely worker.  The wood workers also sang, but it was mostly their cries that distinguished them.  The turpentine Blacks were considered to have been the most poorly paid workers of their period.  Concentrated in self contained, isolated camps, often ten miles from a decent road, these camps afforded not a single luxury.  

Few trees are bled today. The following is a description of how it was done:

Out in the pines the turpentine hand was expected to rake away the old needles and trash from the base of the suitable trees.  This was to protect the faces from fire, that were frequent in that period.    The turpentine hand selected large trees in a virgin forest and any tree over nine inches in diameter in second growth.  At a level close to the ground, two intersecting slashes were cut in an upside down chevron pattern.  This was called a face.  The wounds or streaks as they were termed, led to a resin or "gum" collector.  In the days of large virgin pines, boxes were chopped into the bole of the tree for gum.  Later, a round bottomed clay pot or "cup" was substituted.  Later still, metal containers were often used to replace the heavier pot.  Metal gutters were impaled below the face to direct the flow into the cups.  The resin was then taken to a still.  

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