PITCH PINE. 33 



unusual for each farmer to manufacture what he needed. Such 

 manufacture was necessarily on a small scale and by crude methods. 

 The tree's resin accumulates at the base of the branches, and the 

 rural tar makers ordinarily made use of knots in preference to the 

 clear wood of the trunk. Though the method used was a crude and 

 simple process of destructive distillation, it produced a grade of tar 

 which answered most purposes well. The tar's chief use among 

 country people in early times was one which has now practically 

 passed away. It was the best axle grease for wagons that could then 

 be had, and the wagon without its tar bucket and its tar paddle, 

 swinging from the rear axle, was seldom seen. 



By subjecting the pitch-pine knots to a different treatment a sort 

 of steam distillation shoemaker's wax was produced. This com- 

 modity was widely manufactured, but usually in very small quan- 

 tities. The shoemaker was in every community and in most houses. 

 The linen thread with which the home-tanned leather was sewed was 

 rubbed with wax, and was then called " wax ends." 



Lampblack Avas made of pitch pine long before it was made from 

 natural gas, and the wood was one of the earliest put to use by char- 

 coal burners. In the manufacture of charcoal the tar and other by- 

 products were wasted, as no apparatus was devised to save them. 

 The charcoal was in demand for blacksmith shops and iron furnaces. 



Pitch pine had another extensive use in early times, which might 

 seem unimportant when considered from the standpoint of the pres- 

 ent. It was a substitute for the candle and the lamp at a time and 

 in places where it was frequently impossible to obtain either. Splin- 

 ters that burned with a steady flame afforded light in many a frontier 

 cabin. The gathering of pine knots was as carefully attended to as 

 the cutting of the winter's wood or the cribbing of the corn crop. 

 The knots being rich in resin remained sound long after the pros- 

 trate trunk lying in the woods had decayed. That made the gather- 

 ing of the knots an easy task. It was frequently done by driving 

 an ox sled through the woods in the fall, where pitch pines had fallen 

 and decayed, and picking up the knots that lay in rows on the sur- 

 face of the ground. 



Fagots, split from the bodywood of this pine, in early times and 

 in regions where the trees grew often served for out-of-door light. 

 Torches made of small split pieces bound together in bundles 4 or 5 

 feet long with hickory or yellow birch withes lighted the way on 

 night journeys through the woods. Men who speared fish at night 

 in the rivers and creeks had nothing better than the light from the 

 pitch-pine torch. Hunters who went by boats along the shores of 

 lakes and rivers " shined the eyes " of deer by that method. 

 101500 Bull. 9911 3 



