At Work on a Turpentine Farm, Savannah, G.A.

At Work on a Turpentine Farm, Savannah, G.A.

Categories
Special Collections > Keystone Slides
Type
tiff scanned file from original glass slide
Description
Turpentine, tar, pitch, and rosin are made from the sap of the longleaf pine. This tree grows along the Atlantic Coast from North Carolina to Florida. You can see here how the sap of the tree is obtained. A notch, called a box, is cut at the foot of the tree. Above this box the bark is scarred or gashed so that the sap, in the spring, oozes out and runs into the box. The man at the right is chopping the bark. The man on the left is dipping the turpentine from the box into the keg. When the kegs at the various trees are full, they are gathered up and taken to a distillery (ds-tl´r-). At the distillery the sap is boiled and the turpentine, in the form of vapor, rises into pipes. These pipes are cooled by spring water. This cooling condenses the turpentine, which then runs into barrels. The barrels are sealed and hauled to a shipping point. The United States leads all other countries in the production of turpentine, rosin, and tar. Nine-tenths of these so called "naval stores" come from the turpentine farms in our Southern Atlantic States. North Carolina formerly led in their production. But the trees of this state have been pretty well used up, so that Georgia and Florida now lead. Savannah is the chief port of shipment for naval stores. A turpentine farm contains thousands of trees. These trees, as you see, are not large, but they are tall and very straight. They are scarred from the box up to the height of a man's head. The size of a farm is reckoned by the number of boxes producing turpentine. Some farms have millions of boxes and employ small armies of negroes, who work in gangs under an overseer. Keystone ID: 13747 Note: All titles, descriptions, and location coordinates are from the original Keystone Slide documentation as supplied by the Keystone View Company. No text has been edited or changed.
Rights
Copyright by the Keystone View Company. The original slides are housed in McConnell Library's Special Collections.