Those trees produced a piney resin 

 called turpentine (today's turpentine is actu- 

 ally spirits of turpentine, a distilled product) 

 and the various products of the sap were a 

 colonial mainstay. In their various forms, 

 naval stores were used as a wig adhesive, 

 insect powder, violin bow dressing, and 

 medicine for various internal and external 

 ailments. The resin was used in the manu- 

 facture of tallow candles, wood preservative 

 and sheep dip. You could use it to take the 

 hair off a hog or the pinfeathers off poultry. 



And naval stores were a mainstay of 

 maritime maintenance. Enormous quantities 

 of tar were used to protect ships* rigging, 

 while pitch made a fine caulking for 

 watertight wooden ship hulls. In a single 

 year, the port of Brunswick, just below 

 Wilmington, shipped 59.006 barrels of naval 

 stores to England. 



For two centuries, then, the Cape Fear 

 River clamored with commercial vessels. In 

 the early years of the 1 8th century, 

 "periaugers" were fashioned from a dugout 

 canoe split lengthwise and widened with 

 boards. As the region's naval stores output 

 increased, a large '"flat boat" was designed. 



Robert Schaw's sister. Janet, offers a 

 wonderful accounting of her travels in the 

 Cape Fear region in 1775 — Journal of a 

 Lady of Quality is its title — and described 

 these barges as large enough to cany 200 

 barrels of wares, with room in the middle 

 for the slave crew. 



An advertisement in the Fayetteville 

 American sought to find builders for flats 

 measuring 48 feet by 10 feet and 30 feet by 

 6 feet according to F. Roy Johnson's 

 Rirerboating in Lower Carolina. The boats 

 only got larger. In 1851. according to 

 Johnson, the flat boat J.L Cassidy tied up 

 in Wilmington laden with 554 barrels of 

 naval stores. 



Curiously, the flat boats were powered 

 by the tides. Headed upstream or down, the 

 flat boat crew rode the rising or falling tides, 

 tying up alongside the river as the tides 

 changed. Riding the rivers lunar surge, and 

 with the occasional help from long poles, 

 flats could negotiate the Cape Fear River as 

 far upstream as White Hall. 54 miles above 

 Wilmington. 



We have few reminders of such a 

 time. The day before my river trip I drive 

 out to the Ev-Henwood Nature Preserve, a 

 174-acre tract of land bordering Town 

 Creek, a Cape Fear tributary about 1 2 

 miles south of Wilmington. A short hike 

 among loblolly pines, wax myrtles and 

 sw eet bay trees brings me to an odd 

 earthen feature: a mound of dirt heaped up 

 in the woods, with a concave center like 

 the crater of a miniature volcano. The 

 mound is about 5 feet tall, with American 

 holly and turkey oaks growing from the 

 center. I pace 36 steps around the lip — the 

 cone is about 105 feet in circumference. 



This curious feature is the remnant of 

 a tar kiln: in fact, it is one of the largest and 

 best-preserved in the state. During the 18th 

 and 19th centuries, the Cape Fear woods 

 were pocked with backcountry kilns, 

 usually consisting of a clay-floored cone of 

 earth 30 feet in diameter. Small strips of 

 lightwood — the dead, resinous heartwood 

 of longleaf pine — were piled into the kiln 

 to a height of 12 or 14 feet. When the stack 

 was fired, heat forced resin from the wood. 

 This resin flowed along the clay kiln floor 

 and into a pipe, which drained the kiln of 

 tar that dripped into a wooden barrel buried 

 underground. The fire would bum for four 

 to five days, producing 160 to 180 barrels 

 of tar. each barrel holding about 32 gallons. 



In the century before the Civil War. 

 the Cape Fear low lands sparkled with kiln 

 fires. Pungent black pine smoke drifted 

 across the river, where slaves sang 

 chanteys as they poled the flats with the 

 rising tides. But North Carolina's naval 

 stores industry suffered after the Civil War. 

 The vast longleaf forests were leveled, and 

 the demand for pitch and tar decreased 

 with the advent of steel-hulled ships and 

 wire and cable rigging. Naval stores would 

 continue to be produced in the region into 

 the 20th century, but it would be a mere 

 remnant of the enterprise that turned the 

 lower Cape Fear into a cornerstone of the 

 British empire. 



BELOW ROAN ISLAND, the long 



marsh-fringed left bank of the river signals 

 a shift in topography. Gone are the high 



bluffs nodding over the stream. The 

 married flow of black w ater and brown 

 wends through a palm-fiat landscape, 

 w hite clouds scudding over distant trees. 

 The river w idens to 200 yards or more. 

 We pass the marshes of Robert Schaw's 

 old rice fields, duck under the bascule 

 bridge at Navassa. and skin Horseshoe 

 Bend, a large river oxbow used by sailing 

 ships as a natural turning basin. 



And then, suddenly, the Wilmington 

 w aterfront appears. Just past the U.S. 421 

 bridge, the river's northeast and northwest 

 branches merge at Point Peter, and the 

 famous spires of Wilmington's churches 

 etch the horizon. The vast marshes recede. 

 In their place is the cosmopolitan town 

 clustered on a bluff on the river's eastern 

 bank. 



Shipping out lumber and naval 

 stores. Wilmington w as the state's largest 

 city from 1840 to 1910. presenting a bank 

 of handsome brick and stone buildings 

 lording over a harbor whose wharves 

 bristled with ship masts. It's an impressive 

 view from the water ev en today, and one 

 that once was cov eted by a certain group 

 of Cape Fear mariners — the blockade 

 runners. 



Thirteen days after the evacuation of 

 Fort Sumter. President Abraham Lincoln 

 declared a blockade of the entire South- 

 eastem coast, from Virginia's Fort Henry 

 to the Mexican border. Covering some 

 4.000 miles of shore. Lincoln's action 

 drew derision, but it also led to a booming 

 industry as ship captains scrambled to 

 deliver war material and everyday items 

 through the Federal blockade. Successful 

 runs meant enormous profits: goods often 

 were sold for 500 to 1 .000 percent of their 

 original cost. Buy S10 worth of quinine in 

 Nassau and you could sell it for S400 to 

 S600 in Southern ports. 



Bankrolled largely by British 

 interests — English mills ran on Ameri- 

 can cotton — blockade runners first 

 slipped through the loose Federal noose in 

 anything that w ould float. But as steam 

 power matured, the Federal blockade 

 tightened with faster, more heavily armed 

 Continued 



COASTWATCH 11 



