Black Beauty 



When the Europeans — mostly 

 Irish, Scots, English and Welsh — 

 began settling southeastern North 

 Carolina, the river became an avenue 

 for commerce. Settlers quickly real- 

 ized that the forests of pine offered an 

 almost inexhaustible source of tar, 

 pitch, rosin and turpentine. 



During spring and summer, colo- 

 nists drained resin from the abundant 

 pines of the coastal plain in much the 

 same way as New Englanders tap the 

 sweet sap from sugar maples. Using 

 large stills, woodsmen distilled the 

 sticky pine gum into turpentine and its 

 byproduct rosin, which was used to 

 make soap, varnish and shellac among 

 other things. 



Bleeding pines of their life-sus- 

 taining resin often killed the tree after 

 several years. Then, resourceful 

 woodsmen used the dead wood to 

 produce the sticky black tar that was 

 coated on wagon axles, smeared on 

 livestock wounds, mixed into cough 

 syrup and exported by the barrel to 

 England and its colonies. 



Kilns were used to process tar. 

 Woodsmen stacked the kilns with 

 live or dead wood. The wood was 

 ignited and smoldered. Only a slow 

 burning would force the tar ooze from 

 the pine wood. If a fire blazed too 

 fast, the tar would bum and the kiln 

 would explode. 



Barrel after barrel of tar was pro- 

 duced in this crude fashion among 



Black River and other Cape Fear for- 

 ests. A kiln 30 feet in diameter stacked 

 14 feet high with wood could yield 160 

 to 180 32-gallon barrels of tar. Once 

 used, however, a kiln was abandoned. 

 Even today, evidence of these kilns can 

 be found in southeastern forests. 



During the Colonial period, naval 

 stores were a cornerstone of the Cape 

 Fear basin economy. Colonial records 

 reveal that North Carolina was the larg- 

 est producer of these wood byproducts, 

 and slightly more than half of the 

 state's production left from the Cape 

 Fear port of Brunswick. 



To convey these and other goods 

 to market, Black River settlers loaded 

 them aboard canoes, periaugers, flats 

 and rafts. John Brickell, writing in 

 1737, told how settlers built their ca- 

 noes from the durable giant cypresses 

 that reigned as kings of the coastal 

 swamps. 



A tree of sizable width and length 

 was felled and cut. The resulting log 

 was shaped like a boat, and its center 

 hollowed. Sometimes the canoe was 

 expanded by splitting the hollowed log 

 down the middle and adding boards to 

 the bottom. This wider boat, called a 

 periauger, was capable of hauling as 

 many as 50 barrels of tar or pitch. 



The same forests that yielded a 

 steady supply of naval stores also pro- 

 vided mountains of timber. Colonists 

 felled pine, oak, walnut, cypress and 

 cedar. Before the Revolutionary War, 



the forests of the Cape Fear basin 

 yielded 2.5 million to 3 million feet of 

 lumber per year. North Carolina was 

 second only to Massachusetts in lum- 

 ber production. 



Large landowners built mills for 

 sawing the logs into lumber. To move 

 the wood, cut or uncut, from forest to 

 market, woodsmen relied on water for 

 transportation. In most cases, the 

 wood was lashed together to form 

 large rafts and steered down the river 

 by men known as raft runners, who 

 used only poles and oars to guide their 

 cargo. Often, rafts were linked to- 

 gether to form long trains that snaked 

 down the river like an unclasped 

 string of pearls. 



On the upper Black River and its 

 feeder streams, the Coharie and Six 

 Runs, the runners relied on currents to 

 push the rafts downstream. But on the 

 lower portions of the river, tides influ- 

 enced travel. Raft runners utilized the 

 pull of outgoing tides to move down- 

 stream, but tied their trains of rafts to 

 the riverbanks to avoid the upriver 

 current of inflowing tides. 



Raft runners were hardy. They 

 worked mostly in the cold of winter 

 and early spring when the Black River 

 was swollen with rainwater that made 

 it deeper, wider and swifter. Runners 

 slept without shelter along the damp 

 riverbanks and braved the treachery of 

 river currents, eddies and snags. 



Continued 



COASTWATCH 1 1 



