"Sweating out" tar from pine in a turf-covered kiln 



managing the Rich Lands. James Avirett 

 describes the slave manager as "very 

 little, if any, inferior to any man, white 

 or colored." His father consulted with 

 Philip nightly about the plantation's 

 business, and Philip presented a full 

 accounting of the week's progress to his 

 master every Saturday morning. Averitt 

 admits that "without him [my father] 

 would have been sadly at sea." 



Turpentining began every year by 

 burning away the undergrowth in the 

 pine forest to open the woods to slave 

 laborers. In the late fall and winter, 25 to 

 30 axmen cut "boxes," shallow V- 

 shaped incisions in the bark that exposed 

 the pine sap and directed it down to a 

 single point. There, the workers had 

 hewn a small bowl capable of holding 

 about a quart of raw turpentine. Using 

 long iron blades called roundshaves, 

 axmen kept the sap flowing into those 

 bowls all summer by periodically 

 chipping away dried sap. 



Slaves next moved with dippers 

 through the pines to collect the turpen- 

 tine out of the boxes and empty it into 

 barrels scattered about the woods. 

 Draymen carried them in mule carts to 

 Catherine's Lake, where a slave named 

 Harry oversaw the distilling, an art 

 every bit as sophisticated as making 

 good bourbon. 



The success of the naval stores 

 industry relied on slave skills, but 

 Avirett admits that "close surveillance" 

 of the slave workforce was simply 

 impossible. Unlike other Southern 

 plantations, turpentine workers ranged 

 over hundreds of acres of remote 

 woodlands. Working alone or in pairs, 

 they stayed in primitive camps with 

 little oversight during boxing, chipping 

 and collecting. The work was arduous, 

 the heat unbearable, the housing squalid, 

 the insects a scourge. 



Yet, compared to other slaves, 

 naval stores workers had certain 

 blessings. Since Avirett could not keep 

 an eye on his forest workers, he tried to 

 spur them "to their best work" by paying 

 rewards if they exceeded his quotas for 

 boxing, chipping or barrel making. Thus 

 they had money to spend at a store 

 located at Philip's cabin or, to Avirett' s 



dismay, in a black market that thrived 

 on the plantation's outskirts. The slave 

 turpentiners must also have relished 

 their independent life in the piney 

 woods. 



Now we come to the grave — 

 and telling — deception at the heart of 

 The Old Plantation. Avirett credits the 

 naval stores industry with building the 

 Rich Lands, but he refuses to acknowl- 

 edge that it was also his family's 

 downfall. The Old Plantation describes 

 the Rich Lands as an idyllic paradise 

 (think Gone With the Wind here) right 

 up until the Civil War. And he bitterly 

 blames that horrible war and the 

 freeing of the slaves for destroying the 

 Rich Lands. 



In reality, the Civil War had 

 nothing to do with its ruin. From 

 Onslow County records, I discovered 

 that an ecological donnybrook — the 

 destruction of the longleaf forest — 



brought down both the Rich Lands and 

 the Avirett family in 1857, four years 

 before the Civil War. 



In the 1840s and 1850s, the naval 

 stores industry was rapidly destroying 

 the longleaf pine forest. Avirett does not 

 mention deforestation in The Old 

 Plantation, but contemporary travelers 

 often commented, in one's words, on 

 seeing "nothing but Pinewoods ... on 

 whose trees the process of gumming 

 turpentine was visible." The famed 

 agriculturalist Edmund Ruffin, a friend 

 of the Aviretts, observed that "scarcely 

 a good [longleaf] in North Carolina has 

 escaped the operation." 



The average lifetime of longleafs 

 after boxing was only about six years. 

 According to G. Terry Sharrer, a 

 Smithsonian forestry historian, 100 

 gallons of turpentine was the product of 

 12 to 14 acres of longleaf forest. When 

 Wilmington's exports rose from 7,218 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 23 



