526 FULLING 



Carolina, Virginia, and Tennessee. The extract has usually been marketed as 

 a 25 per cent liquid, but at times has been evaporated to solid form containing 

 65 per cent tannin. 



In 1900, 64,000 barrels of liquid extract was produced. Consumption figures 

 for 1918 report over 48 million pounds of solid extract, 316^/4 million pounds 

 of liquid. In 1922, 43 plants in the United States were extracting domestic 

 material and produced 428,500,000 pounds of 25 per cent liquid that year. 

 Chestnut extract made up 90 per cent of this and consumed 496,000 cords 

 of wood; the remaining 10 per cent was hemlock and oak extract. In 1940 

 there were 21 domestic extraction factories operating in Alabama, California, 

 New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Virginia, and four 

 idle plants in Carolina and Virginia. Chestnut extract production that year 

 was 360 million pounds of 25 per cent tannin, and the total extract capacity 

 of all 21 plants was 63 per cent of that of the 43 plants functioning twenty 

 years earlier. This decline in the number of extracting units and in their 

 combined production was prophetic of the final demise of the industry in 1956, 

 as noted later. 



In the last normal year prior to World War II, about 60 per cent of all 

 domestic tannin was obtained from chestnut wood. The remainder at that 

 time was furnished almost equally by chestnut oak and eastern hemlock barks. 



The devastating havoc wrought by the chestnut blight in the former great 

 stands of this tree in the eastern United States is an oft-told tale. Within 

 thirty years from the discovery of the disease in the New York Zoological 

 Park in 1904, it spread from Maine to Michigan to Alabama and annihilated 

 the species as a self-replenishing source of lumber. The extermination was 

 not, however, a total economic loss, for the tannin content of the wood pre- 

 served the standing dead trees against decay. Millions of them, their bark 

 gone, have stood as a sun-bleached ghastly gray leafless forest in many parts 

 of the southern Appalachians and have contributed to a flourishing lumber 

 industry which prospered on providing chestnut wood — worm-eaten or not — 

 for interior trim. Mill waste and wood unsuitable for lumber have fed the 

 tannin-extracting plants, and the extracted wood has then found use in the 

 hardwood paper-pulp mills of the region. To a large extent, tannin extract 

 has been a by-product of paper manufacture in areas where pulp mills have 

 been the principal consumers of second-grade hardwood material. 



In 1942 the Appalachian Forest Experiment Station estimated that there 

 were 22 million units of standing chestnut trees in the mountains of northern 

 Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, and West Virginia 

 and that they ensured a 24-year supply of raw material for the 16 extracting 

 plants in the area. A more conservative estimate the previous year gave 15 to 

 20 years. 



The color bestowed upon leather by the various tanning materials is of 

 prime importance in evaluating those agents, and in this respect chestnut 



