The Disappearance of the Longleaf Pine Savanna

by Lucas Crim, LandTrust intern summer 2015

June 18, 2015

Once covering 90 million acres of the southern colonies, including much of North Carolina’s coastal plain and the southern Piedmont region, longleaf pine forests were a dominating feature of the 18^th-century South. These forests were unique from any seen today due to the hardy, fire-resistant nature of the longleaf pine. Seedlings stick low to the ground to survive as fires sweep over them, and then undergo a growth spurt that quickly elevates their fire-sensitive needles above the flames. Fires would sweep through swaths of forests, destroying competing trees and undergrowth, and creating vast tracts of grassy forestland spotted with mature longleaf pines. These fires were mostly natural or lit by Native Americans to flush out game. The unique environment they left behind came to be known as “longleaf pine savannas.”

By the late 1800s, however, these savannas had been decimated by the Civil War, dense settlement, and, most of all, the vast, destructive nature of the naval stores industry. Naval stores in this case refer to products such as tar; pitch, derived from the boiling of tar; and turpentine, distilled from the gum that living trees secrete to protect wounds in their trunks. These products were essential to the production and maintenance of wooden sailing vessels. With a series of wars around the turn of the 18^th-century, Britain was desperate for a cheap, reliable source of naval stores in order to replace and build ships in order to continue the expansion of its empire. With its 90 million acres of longleaf pine forests stretching over 150,000 square miles, the American colonies offered an expansive, reliable solution to Britain’s predicament. In order to incentivize colonists to manufacture naval stores, the British Parliament passed the “Act for Encouraging the Importation of Naval Stores from America” in 1704. This act helped to significantly reduce the cost of shipping naval stores from the colonies back to the ruling nation.

In North Carolina in particular, the production of naval stores became an extremely attractive industry. The colony had no staple crops, but did have navigable coastal rivers and a vast supply of longleaf pine forests. In 1768 alone, England imported 135,000 barrels of tar, pitch, and turpentine from the colonies, 60% of which came from North Carolina, making naval stores the colony’s leading export. It was during this period of time that the “Tarheel” nickname is rumored to have come to North Carolinians, stemming from the spilled tar that stuck to workers’ heels as they harvested and distilled naval stores.

With the economic success of the naval store industry, so came the disappearance of longleaf pine forests themselves. In order to collect the resources necessary to create naval stores, workers would make deep cuts into the trees, about 4 inches deep, causing the trees to secrete gum. This gum would then be collected and taken to a distillery to be processed into turpentine. Once the cuts were made, however, trees were vulnerable to disease, and oftentimes the tree would be overharvested, as producers were more concerned with rapid, maximized profit, rather than sustainable, long-term profit. By 1860, North Carolina produced 97% of all naval stores made in the United States. With such exhaustive production, it was not long before longleaf pine forests disappeared almost entirely from the state’s landscape. Only about 3% of the original longleaf pine forests of the 1700s remain. One can still see the evidence of the harvesting of naval stores in the distinct, V-shaped stripes carved into trees long ago, now commonly known as “cat faces.”