Naval stores industry

The naval stores industry produces and markets products derived from the

With the demise of wooden ships, those uses of pine resin ended, but the former naval stores 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),^[3] 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.^[4]

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 in traditional rubber and maple syrup production. In one method, 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

Once, large operations, known as "factors," controlled huge tracts of forests, some in the hundreds of thousands of acres, which they leased to smaller "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.^[5][6]

• 
  Herty system in use on turpentine trees in northern Florida, circa 1936
• 
  Herty turpentine cup, made of clay. The hole is for nailing to a pine tree
• 
  Pine tree with metal guides to a Herty cup
• 
  "Chipping" a pine tree in

  Georgia

  (c. 1915) to get sap
• 
  Turpentine cup made of tin, was attached to a pine tree

Basic processes

The basic raw material,