How We Live Today

How We Live Today

The Naval Stores Industry in Northern Florida

By MIKE WALKER

Mike Walker

Deep in the forest between Taylor in Baker County, and the western part of Hamilton County are found small settlements with the interesting suffix of "still" in their names: Kennedy Still, Black's Still, Camp Still. Little more than a few remaining buildings and a passing road within seemingly endless pine woods, these settlements are part of the legacy of the naval stores industry, or the production of turpentine products from the oleoresin of longleaf (Pinus palustris) and slash pine (Pinus elliottii).

The name "naval stores" comes from the days of old when wooden ships were made of weatherproofed wood processed with turpentine and other pine oleoresin products, but even as maritime technology changed markedly, the need for naval stores products remained and so did the name itself.

For northern Florida and southern Georgia, the harvesting and extraction of turpentine was once a prime industry and one that demanded hard labor and back-breaking work. In pre-Civil War times, expectedly, this work was done by slaves while during the Reconstruction it became a field performed by free Blacks and later, as labor was difficult to find and retain given the toil and adverse working conditions, convicts and the very down-and-out who could find nothing better.

Such intersections of economy and social justice one might not expect to locate in the backwoods of Baker County, but the history of the naval stores industry in many ways reads like a shorthand for the history of the region. Important legal cases even came about germane to labor practices and for decades, Baker, Columbia, and Hamilton counties all played a crucial role in the state's-and the nation's-production of naval stores.

Without this industry not only would we not have Black's Still or Kennedy Still, but we might not have a lot of the history and development of northern Florida. As labor and ecological concerns grew, this hard-scramble way of life began to slip away with only one naval stores processing operation still working by 2001, the Filtered Rosin Products plant in Baxley, Georgia, which now under the ownership of AKZO-Nobel has also ceased producing naval stores products via conventional means. In fact, most turpentine products now come from either slash pine operations overseas or by-products of papermaking operations. At one time though, most of the nation's turpentine-a product essential to so many areas of industry-came from pine trees in Florida, Georgia, and Alabama and was launched out into the world by the barrel from the port of Savannah, Georgia. While Savannah may now be thought of for its colonial history and cotton shipping, the real development of its port as one of the south's leading shipping centers in fact grew out of the naval stores industry.

Turpentine country

The naval stores industry was, at its apex, important enough to warrant not only the investments of corporate interests and hard larbor but also of the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service, which maintained its Naval Stores and Timber Production Laboratory in Olustee up to 1996. While by the latter part of its service life the laboratory was more involved in timber production research germane to silviculture and pest and disease-control issues, the laboratory started out as a scientific means of bettering the naval stores industry. According to Stevin Westcott, a press officer for the Forest Service's Southern Research Station which has jurisdiction over the former laboratory in Olustee, the Forest Service still maintains a research forest there while the physical buildings were turned over to the park rangers of the Osceola National Forest for use as their offices. The research forest itself covers around 3,500 acres and is maintained for long-term experimental purposes related to pine genetics and silviculture.

Westcott was able to place me in touch with Ken Outcalt, a Forest Service scientist now at the Service's facility in Athens, Georgia, who worked for years at the Olustee Experimental Forest. According to Outcalt, the primary mission of the lab was to "provide information that forestry could use to improve efficiency of naval stores operations while maintaining the trees' health for future use for wood products".

The writer and historian Gloria Jahoda-whom regular readers of my column know as one of my heroes and reasons for writing about Florida's history-devoted a chapter in her book "The Other Florida" to naval stores production. Jahoda went around to far-flung turpentine camps in the 1960s interviewing workers and considering their plight; even as recently as the 1960s turpentine production was mainly a traditional, tough, business conducted by white foremen and businessmen but mainly Black workers. Like coal mines in West Virginia, workers often sold their souls to the company store, paying on items far more than they would in an open market and thereby spending their wages before they were even paid for their work. While labor conditions were changing for the better during Jahoda's time, the entire industry was also changing and moving away from traditional methods towards new, less labor-intensive, technologies. Moreover, workers were starting to find jobs that were less back-breaking than the toil of turpentine production and producers were at a loss to find workers who would brave snake-infested, insect-filled, backwoods in the blinding Florida heat for low wages. The whole industry, as Jahoda notes, was in a state of flux.

Now, the transiton has happened and turpentine is not produced in camps far into the forest that go by names followed by the telling word "still". PCS Phosphate/PotashCorp's massive phosphate mining and refining operation in White Springs, Hamilton County, now provides 901 jobs-far more than any single turpentine producer would have-while maintaining an ethical and environmentally-sound operation. Times certainly have changed. The legacy of the industry though is still one that enriches the history of the region: the Olustee Experimental Forest and the Naval Stores and Timber Production Laboratory contributed a great wealth of research findings not only to naval stores production but to silviculture and plant pathology and this is useful to current forest products industries in Florida and elsewhere. The unique laboratory though, as its very name suggests, was based on the economic importance of the naval stores industry.

Social scientists Cassandra Johnson and Josh McDaniel in their book chapter "Turpentine Negro" in the anthology "To Love the Wind and the Rain: African Americans and Environmental History" note that pre-Civil War patterns of wealth and land-ownership continued apace into the Reconstruction and even up to the 1980s when the naval stores industry more or less ceased to exist in the American south as Black workers never had the social agency or ability to make anything beyond the most basic wages in the industry while land and business-owning whites were able to turn serious profits. Nonetheless and despite hardship associated with this industry, it is something that has remained part of collective memory of southern African-Americans.

"I think most Blacks are not aware of the predominant Black presence in the naval stores industry although I say in the chapter that this connection may be retained in the Black collective memory.", Dr. Johnson explains. "Any contemporary knowledge of the Black connection to turpentining may be attributed largely to Zora Neal Hurston's novels and her recordings of Black folk life in Florida, much of which is tied in some way to turpentining or railroad work gangs. Maybe Blacks more closely tied to communities where this work occurred have a better sense of this connection."

Dr. Johnson, who works for the United States Department of Agriculture's Forest Service in Athens, Georgia, researched the naval stores industry when she "was doing some research on the Black historical relationship to the land. I was interested in negative experiences Blacks had had with woodlands". Johnson's associate on the book chapter, Josh McDaniel, has also researched the labor experience of African-Americans in the turpentine business but despite this research and Gloria Jahoda's early on-site interviews with such workers, this is an area of race and labor relations that has been little-studied by academics.

While Dr. Johnson said she was unaware of current race relations and industry in Hamilton County and other north Florida locales as this was outside of her research focus, anecdotal evidence suggests that the legacy of the turpentine industry, its unfairness in labor practices and its harsh working conditions, probably have left a lasting imprint on race relations in the region. The power imbalance in the naval stores industry though was not limited to only African-Americans: poor whites also composed a large sector of labor in this difficult business. For a long time, there were simply no other jobs in the area especially for those who did not own enough land to make a living farming. Even then, given the dense pine forests and swamps of the region farming was also a very hard way of life. With contemporary industrial developments such as phosphate mining and ecotourism in the Suwannee River area, we find a growth away from agricultural products although really, agriculture and forest products still remain essential industries in the region and will for as long as the stewardship of the land is of such quality to make these vocations rewarding.

The writer David T. Warner in his book "Vanishing Florida" makes a point of how rural many areas of northern and north-central Florida really are and touches on the situation that was found in turpentine country: what we now consider as "a community" has higher expectations for it than what people held thirty or more years ago. "Black's Still" was in fact a community, though not an incorporated place with post office and stores and restaurants as say, White Springs, is now. Yet it was a place where people lived, a place on the map (and it still is, for that matter, on the Florida Department of Transportation county highway map for Hamilton County). In times when travel was difficult, when roads were poor and most people in the backwoods lacked automobiles, any community at all was a welcome sight for a person out on his travels. In looking at the naval stores industry, we find history in these small places. For years, the more remote parts of our state have been visited only by those who lived there or those constructing some essential utility for the area; now, ecotourism has bloomed into a means of both bringing better protection to the land and educating the public firsthand in the beauty and diversity of various ecosystems of Florida. White Springs, with its prime location on the Suwannee River, is a leading example of a turn towards tourism and the benefits of such to a rural community.

As for turpentine, if you find it coming from the pine forests of northern Florida at all, it would be as a by-product of paper mill production and paper mills still are found commonly in southern Georgia so there is a remote link to the legacy of naval stores there. A better sociocultural link though is found in what older people in small rural towns recall their own parents telling them of the bitter lifestyle of the turpentine worker. Northern Florida and southern Georgia have moved ahead with advances in industry and technology and we can only be thankful for that, but the memories of this once crucial industry are important to retain: the Naval Stores and Timber Production Laboratory, though no longer in service, was the fulcrum in many ways on which the balance between old ways and newer, better, technologies rested. In those quiet woods with their miles of pine trees we can locate a lot of silent history as our ancestors found in the humble pine a means of furthering American navies and also allowing for progress in our own region.

 

MIKE WALKER is a journalist and writer based in Gainesville, Florida who writes about ecology, natural history, and social history for this and other news media. Mike spends a lot of time in insect-filled backwoods and looking over Google Earth photos of rural Florida. He may be reached at: cloudrace@prontomail.com