The naval stores industry collects, processes, and markets forest product

Forest product

A forest product is any material derived from a forest for commercial use, such as lumber, paper, or forage for livestock. Wood, by far the dominant commercial forest product, is used for many industrial purposes, such as the finished structural materials used for the construction of buildings, or...

s created from the oleoresin of particular types of pine tree (genus

Genus

In biology, a genus is a low-level taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms, which is an example of definition by genus and differentia...

 Pinus), the slash pine

Slash Pine

Pinus elliottii, commonly known as the Slash Pine, is a pine native to the southeastern United States, from southern South Carolina west to southeastern Louisiana, and south to the Florida Keys....

 and the longleaf pine

Longleaf Pine

Pinus palustris, commonly known as the Longleaf Pine, is a pine native to the southeastern United States, found along the coastal plain from eastern Texas to southeast Virginia extending into northern and central Florida....

. The industry is associated with the maintenance of the wooden ships and tackle of pre-20th century navies, which were caulked and waterproofed using the pitch (or resin, also known as tar

Tar

Tar is modified pitch produced primarily from the wood and roots of pine by destructive distillation under pyrolysis. Production and trade in tar was a major contributor in the economies of Northern Europe and Colonial America. Its main use was in preserving wooden vessels against rot. The largest...

) of the pine tree.

History

Although these uses of pine resin ended with the passing of wooden ships, the industry remained vigorous as new products created new markets. First extensively described by Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted

Frederick Law Olmsted was an American journalist, social critic, public administrator, and landscape designer. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture, although many scholars have bestowed that title upon Andrew Jackson Downing...

 in his book A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States (1856), the naval stores industry was one of the economic mainstays of the southeastern United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 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.

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 on a rubber plantation or in a maple sugar grove. However, 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 sap into a quart-sized rectangular cup fixed to the tree. Each new “streak” is put onto the tree above the preceding one, and gradually a vertical “cat face” more than thirty inches in height is formed. Through the mid-twentieth century, a "puller," a type of hack that had a long handle, was used to extend the streak up the tree to a height of more than seven feet.

Once, large operators, known as “factors,” controlled huge tracts of forests, some in the hundreds of thousands of acres, which they leased to “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

Savannah, Georgia

Savannah is the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. Established in 1733, the city of Savannah was the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Today Savannah is an industrial center and an important...

, commemorates an area on the Savannah River harbor where thousands of barrels of produce were collected for transshipment

Transshipment

Transshipment or Transhipment is the shipment of goods or containers to an intermediate destination, and then from there to yet another destination....

. 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.

The basic raw material, pine resin, once collected, is converted into two major products — rosin

Rosin

.Rosin, also called colophony or Greek pitch , is a solid form of resin obtained from pines and some other plants, mostly conifers, produced by heating fresh liquid resin to vaporize the volatile liquid terpene components. It is semi-transparent and varies in color from yellow to black...

 and turpentine

Turpentine

Turpentine is a fluid obtained by the distillation of resin obtained from trees, mainly pine trees. It is composed of terpenes, mainly the monoterpenes alpha-pinene and beta-pinene...

. For many years rosin and turpentine were used unprocessed in common household products such as soap, paper, paint, and varnish

Varnish

Varnish is a transparent, hard, protective finish or film primarily used in wood finishing but also for other materials. Varnish is traditionally a combination of a drying oil, a resin, and a thinner or solvent. Varnish finishes are usually glossy but may be designed to produce satin or semi-gloss...

. Today most rosin is altered to be used in a wide range of products that includes paper sizing, surface coatings, adhesives, printing inks, and rubber compounds. Turpentine, like rosin, has become a versatile material exploited to develop uses in fragrances, flavors, vitamins, household cleaning products, medicines, and polyterpene resins.

Because of a shortage of workers willing to perform the heavy manual labor involved in the streaking of many acres of trees and in collecting the resin tree by tree as well, the gum naval stores industry entered a period of steep decline beginning in the 1960s. As of 2001, only one large-scale facility (begun as Filtered Rosin Products) in Baxley, Georgia

Baxley, Georgia

As of the census of 2000, there were 4,150 people, 1,567 households, and 1,048 families residing in the city. The population density was 580.7 people per square mile . There were 1,866 housing units at an average density of 261.1 per square mile...

, continued in operation, serving the remaining naval stores producers in the surrounding area. Gradually, the method of tapping trees to obtain naval stores products has become overshadowed by industries which yield these products as byproducts of other operations.