Slash Pine is the most common pine in natural stands in SE Georgia. It's range is limited to the deep south as it is very intolerant of ice and snow. In the early years industry tried planting Slash up in the piedmont of GA and into the Carolinas, but most stands were decimated by ice storms over the years. Now it is restricted to FLA, SE GA, and the immediate gulf coast of ALA and MISS. The needle length is intermediate (9-12 in) in length between Loblolly (7-9 in) and Longleaf Pine (12-18 in). In it's natural range in the deep south it is much preferred for sawtimber and poles as it produces tall straight naturally well pruned trees in natural stands. Longleaf and loblolly generally are knottier and don't grade out quite as well, Longleaf because of it's large knots and Loblolly because it doesn't naturally prune itself as well. In the past 30 years or so Loblolly has replaced Slash as the primary species planted by industry as it responds to fertilization better than Slash and as most plantation wood was grown for fiber, form and pruning were not important issues. In recent years the trend has reversed with many former ag fields being planted in slash under the CRP program in anticipated of the burgeoning straw market. Slash produces much superior straw than Loblolly.
The Gum Turpentine business is now dead in the US, the last producer shutting down some 8-10 years ago. When I started as a county forester in Appling County GA back in the 70's I had over 300 gum producers in the county. Even the paper companies leased their slash stands to producers to work. Bugs and labor killed the business in the US. There is still a large gum turpentine plant in Baxley, but all of it's raw gum is shipped in from China. The other sources of Turpentine and rosin are tall oil, a byproduct of the paper industry and steam extraction from lightered stumps. There is only one plant still doing stumps and that is Hercules in Brunswick GA. They are still buying lightered stumps at the same price they were getting 30 years ago, about $5 a ton. Used to be about every town had a stump buyer and it was big business, now they are just about all gone. They even had dogs that would go in the woods and sniff them out like "drug" dogs. The gum industry started up in the mid Atlantic states with the pitch pine to caulk the ships, hence the name naval stores. They gathered it by pilling the wood, setting it afire and covering the pile with dirt. They would leave a drain out the bottom of the pile for the gum to run out and catch it in a dug hole. Later in the 19th century the industry moved south into the Carolinas where they discovered they got better yields by "boxing" the longleaf pines and distilling the gum with small fire stills. During the first years of the 20th century, Charles Herty near Savannah researched using external cups, developing the "Herty" cup out of clay that was suspended from the tree with a tin gutter directing the gum into the cup. This avoided the damage that "boxing" did to the pines. These clay cups evolved into glass cups and eventually the tin (galvanized) cups. At the end there was even some minor usage of plastic cups and a little reseach into tapping the tree with a wood bit like maples and screwing a 2 liter coke bottle into the hole, or suspending a plastic bag under a metal "tap". Dispite the inovations, the cheapness of imported gum killed and inability to get the labor (and bugs) killed the business. Slash Pines yielded more and better quality gum than the Longleaf so gum turpenting settled in the deep south during the 20th century leaving the longleaf forests of the Carolinas. Just about every little community and crossroads had a fire still during the first half of the 20th century. After the second world war, larger comercial operations sprung up slowly closing the small fire stills. You can still find the remains of these stills in the country sides, though the copper was long ago sold for scrap. There are perhaps a half a dozen left intact and preserved around south GA. In fact this morning's paper ran a story about this weekends CatFace festival in Portal GA where they will fire up one of the few remaining stills and run off a batch of rosin and turpentine. Portal bills itself as the turpentine city and catface is the name given to the streaked faces of the worked trees. The diagonal streaks added every few weeks resembled a cats wiskers. Probably more than you wanted to know....but the industry was a part of our culture and still fascinates. On Sep 25, 8:34 am, [email protected] wrote: > Larry, > > Slash pine is a cool species. But I know very little about it and where it > fits into the ecosystem as well as its economic uses. Wasn't it an important > source of turpentine? I would image our buddy Will Fell could tell us a lot > about the species. > > Bob > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Eastern Native Tree Society http://www.nativetreesociety.org Send email to [email protected] Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/entstrees?hl=en To unsubscribe send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
