SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



If they pose as public benefactors, it is because their 

 bulldozers are clearing over four hundred thousand 

 acres of cutover land a year. That's a lot of fresh land 

 for crops and grazing. 



From the pine stumps yanked out of these cleared 

 acres, the wood-rosin plants are now extracting more 

 than half of all the rosin and turpentine produced in 

 this country. The two pioneers have been joined by 

 four smaller, tiptoe-alert companies Mackie, Conti- 

 nental, Phoenix & Dixie, and Crosby and Yaryan's 

 moon-eyed notion of wringing profits out of dead 

 stumps has become a real industry. 



Long since, wood-rosin operators have learned to 

 make a rosin as pale and a turpentine as nearly odor- 

 less as the finest grades made in the fire-stills out of 

 gum from the living trees. From an arrant nuisance, 

 their additional product, pine oil, has become a cheer- 

 ful money-maker. In 1932, when I first visited the Her- 

 cules plant at Brunswick, Georgia, pine oil was oozing 

 out of storage tanks faster than they could be built, 

 and in the laboratories the chemists were scratching 

 their pates baldheaded trying to think up uses of this 

 oily flood. In 1945 at this same plant, I found them 

 deliberately taking good turpentine and making it into 

 pine oil to fill imperative orders for essential munitions 

 needs. 



But that is not all the incredible story. During World 

 War II so active was the demand for certain critical 



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