What Happened to State's Tar and Pitch Industries? Nov. 20, 1924

Tar and Pitch Exhausted

Natural Resources, the bi-weekly publication of the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey, tells how the tar, pitch, and turpentine industry of North Carolina faded away.

Shipments of naval stores from Wilmington amounted to 537,000 barrels in 1852. In 1920 they had fallen to 3,000 barrels. Forests of pine were slaughtered, and no replanting was done.

“So bountifully was the Coastal Plain provided with pine forests,” says Natural Resources, that for a century and a half the killing of pine trees went ahead in merry fashion, while the supplies of tar, pitch, turpentine, and rosin steadily increased. It looked as though Nature had provided in these forests a store of material so great as to defy the puny gathering of man to materially decrease.

“The long-leaf pine forests put up a brave fight, but the odds were too great. In addition to a method of turpentining which killed in three years, they were ravaged by fires. In addition to fires, lumbering operations frequently made clean sweeps of great areas. In addition to axe and fire, livestock was given free range in the denuded territory, with the result that seedlings that had escaped everything else furnished the tidbit for the voracious appetite of the razorback hog.

“As a result, the naval stores industry is gone, and of approximately 8,300,000 acres of pinelands in the Coastal Plane less than 3 million are in merchantable timber and more than 3,300,000 acres are not producing timber of any kind.

“As a further result of neglect and abuse so thorough as even to destroy the seed trees, at least half of the non-producing 3,300,000 acres are incapable of natural reproduction.

“It is this final result of methods exhibiting almost a genius for waste that is responsible for the waste lands, untimbered and untilled and a tax burden of increasing severity, that gave so much the appearance of a graveyard to vast areas of barrens in the eastern part of the State.”

From page 4 of the Chapel Hill Weekly, Nov. 20, 1924

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073229/1924-11-20/ed-1/seq-4/