By the 1700s, naval power and commercial shipping were the keys to global domination, and fleets of ships from Spain, Portugal, Holland, Britain and France all vied with each other for the control of overseas colonies and the maritime trade routes between them. The sailing ships of that time were made from wooden planks that were fitted to frameworks, and to waterproof the hull, the gaps between planks were caulked with rope or rags that were soaked in waterproof pitch–which was made from turpentine. The rope riggings for the sails were also waterproofed with a coating of pitch tar. This meant that the turpentine industry had a vitally important role to play in any maritime economy.

Great Britain in particular was dependent upon her Navy, and she was fortunate enough to have North American colonies which could be taken advantage of. The northeastern colonies had vast resources of oak timber that could be used for ship-building, but it was the southeast with its abundance of pine trees, especially the seemingly endless tracts of Longleaf Pine forest, which became the center of turpentine production.

By the time of the late 18th and early 19th century, after the United States had won its independence, the uses for turpentine had expanded, and now it was also used for medicines (both real and quack), cleaning products, paints, wood polish, soap, and as a solvent in a variety of industrial processes. Many indoor lamps of the time burned a mixture of alcohol and turpentine. The tree sap had become commercially important as well as a military necessity–and the US had vast resources for producing it.

Originally, the turpentine industry was concentrated in the area around the Carolinas, which had a better transportation infrastructure and allowed the finished product to be shipped cheaply to the industrial cities of the northeast. However, a problem soon arose. Before the Civil War, the usual method of extracting the sap from pine trees (the raw source of turpentine) was to peel off a large section of bark and use an adze to carve a deep hollow into the base of the trunk, known as a “box”: the thick liquid sap would then ooze into this and collect there. (These distinctive cuts became known as “cat faces”.) This process tended to kill the tree, though, and after a time the pine trees in any given area would be gone, and the industry found itself slowly migrating further and further south to new forest areas.

By the 1870s the turpentine camps had reached Florida. While most turpentiners were small family-owned operations, there were also a handful of established giants who dominated the industry. One of these was the Knabb Company, run by Thomas Jefferson Knabb–who owned over 200,000 acres of pine forest and parleyed his wealth into election as a State Senator.

By the end of the Civil War, the extraction process had also changed. Instead of cutting out a hollow “box”, the turpentine workers (known as “tree chippers”) would cut off a patch of bark and make a series of cuts, and the oozing sap would run into metal gutters and be gathered in metal or terra cotta pots that were known as “cups”. Most of this work was done by slaves in pre-Civil War times, and by poorly-paid African-American workers after Emancipation. The turpentine workers would live in makeshift camps deep out in the pine woods, along with all the other people who were necessary to support them, like cooks, blacksmiths, and barrel-makers. Housing could often be a series of canvas tents, but were also sometimes made from pre-fabricated sections of pine-wood walls that were carried around on mule carts or rail cars and which could be hastily put up and taken down. Since a worker’s family often lived and moved with him, these makeshift mobile villages usually had schools, churches, and other amenities, and some turpentine camps had as many as 100 workers and their families. In most cases, all of the workers were paid, not in cash, but in company scrip, which was only redeemable at the company store, and this was where the employees purchased all of their food, clothing, and necessities. Under Florida law, workers could not quit their job if they owed a debt to the company store, so inflated prices and low pay insured a state of virtual slavery in the camps. 

In later times, local prisons would rent out inmates to serve as laborers in Florida’s agricultural plantations, including the turpentine camps. These prisoners were not paid at all, and all of that money went to the prison administration. Since the men were convicts (and were usually African-American), their lives were cheap and nobody really cared what happened to them. In some camps as many as two dozen workers died per year. The convict-labor system was not ended in Florida until 1923.

The “cup” method of harvesting did not kill the tree, and so once all the turpentine had been played out, the trees were usually sold to loggers, who cut them down and turned them into lumber. As a replacement, the now-gone Longleaf Pine forests were replanted with faster-growing Slash Pines to allow a quicker turnaround before they could be tapped and logged again.

The next step in turpentine production was to distill the raw pine sap. Usually these stills were located near an easy transportation route like a railroad station, and all of the chippers would bring their barrels of collected sap, usually on mules, to the still. The distilling process would separate out the heavier components, which formed “rosin”. Rosin itself had a multitude of uses, but it could also be mixed with the thicker sediments to form pitch and with charcoal powder to form tar. The lighter and more volatile components, meanwhile, became turpentine. This process of distillation was a hazardous operation: both turpentine and pitch are highly flammable and it wasn’t unusual for the still to catch on fire and burn everything around it. Typically, a 50-gallon batch of extracted pine sap would produce around 325 pounds of pitch and tar, and roughly 10 gallons of liquid turpentine.

By the 1920s, however, nearly all merchant and naval ships were being made from steel, and cheaper industrial chemicals distilled from petroleum were beginning to replace pitch and turpentine. While the oil industry invested heavily in research to find new uses for their product, the turpentine industry did not, and it fell far behind. The turpentine camps began to disappear as the industry faded away. By 1950 it was almost totally dead.