Turpentining in South Georgia

For an upcoming article, I was researching turpentine when I followed a trail to a Valdosta State University web site. The web site is titled  “Faces” in the Piney Woods: Traditions of Turpentine in South Georgia. It is an oral history project of the South Georgia Folklife Project at the University. The term faces originated from the process that “turpentiners” went through to get the gum (tar) from the Slash Pine and Longleaf Pine trees. Cuts and scrapes in the bark resulted in a simplified “cat face” appearing on the trunk.

At one time, Georgia was the leader in extracting turpentine and rosin from the collected gum. It was a large industry that was especially important from the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. In 2001 on August 9th, Major Phillips collected the last commercial bucket of gum in Georgia , it marked the end of domestic turpentining in the United States.

If the process of making turpentine is not something you’ve seen or studied , it’s new to me , then here’s a short lesson. (Sorry for the fuzzy photos. They were taken from video on the Valdosta State University web site.)

Turpentine (and rosin) is distilled from gum that’s collected from trees. To collect the gum, workers would begin by “pushing down” the bark of the tree. The work began in late winter, sometime in February or March. Pushing down involved a worker using a bush axe to clean the bark off a tree and provide an area to set up and collect the gum.

After the trunk was clean, a set of tins was nailed to the trunk. The tins were made up of an apron and a gutter. The apron was positioned level and the gutter angled into the apron. Five nails held everything in place. A cup , a collector that looked more like a pan for baking bread than a cup , was held just under the apron, again with nails. (Ever wonder why you find odd pieces of metal in some of your lumber!)

Next the tree would be “Streaked.” Done in late March or early April, a cut was made just above the tins. A little farther up the trunk, workers would use a hack to form a v-shaped notch across the cleaned area. The scraped cut is where the gum would ooze out of the tree. Each week a new scrape was added to the tree. Each scrape moved up the trunk. At the start of each year, the tins were placed higher up the tree, marking the trunk year by year. Each tree produced gum for five years.

“Dipping” a tree was when the cup was emptied into a bucket. The gum was scraped into a bucket with a paddle. The cleaned cup would then be re-positioned for the next amount of gum.The amount of gum from the tree would vary depending on the season, but once the cup was filled, the setup would have to be dipped. Two streaks would produce about a 1/2 gallon of gum in the summertime.

Buckets (recycled nail kegs) held about 20 cups (not a liquid measurement) of gum. The buckets were then dumped into barrels. The barrels, at least those shown in the video, were painted a specific color for identification purposes and held eight buckets of gum, or 435 pounds of crude tar. (Before the advent of steel barrels, oak barrels were used. The wooden barrels were stored in a waterhole to keep the staves tight.)

The gum was then heated in a still (remember Granny Clampet’s still). The heat would produce steam. As the steam moved through a length of coil, it would condensate and fill barrels with a water/turpentine mixture. Because turpentine is lighter than water, the solvent would reside at the top of a barrel and be drained off the water. We have turpentine.

I’ll bet you think differently the next time you pour turpentine.

– Glen D. Huey

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