The Troubling, Hidden History of Turpentine

Today turpentine is a substance with any number of industrial uses -- but most people don't know much about it, and even fewer people know its history in the early days of the US. In today's episode, Ben welcomes returning guest Yves Jeffcoat as they dive into the largely forgotten story of turpentine camps, from how they began to how they ended and, perhaps most importantly, how the effects of this industry have reprecussions in the modern day.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome

(00:27):
to the show, Ridiculous Historians. Thank you, as always so
much for tuning in. I am Ben. I am joined
with our super producer Casey Pegram our guest producers Andrew
Howard and Max Williams. I'm pointing at them, but they're
not in the room. I'm just I'm trying to be

(00:47):
a visual thinker. Uh, you know you guys. You guys
know me by now if you don't know me, but well,
whatever my writer died Nol, as I said previously, is
off on some advent yours. So I've been immensely fortunate
to gather some guest host You previously heard my pal

(01:07):
h Matt Frederick on a weird history of pointy shoes
that was ruined by the Quisters spoiler alert. But today
we're trying something is something different. This is fantastic journey
and I think it's an important one to know about
that doesn't get as much attention in the modern days
it should. It is a topic that I was not

(01:30):
going to explore on my own. I reached out for
some help from some of the experts and fellow Ridiculous Historians.
I am proud to announce you know her, you love her.
Today we're joined by the one and only Eve's Jeff
Code Eves. The crowd goes wild. Wow, what an introduction.

(01:51):
I love that. Yes, I am here, and I'm honestly
very happy to be here because this topic is something
I've honestly been dying to talk about it rather than
just like being in my own little stylo with it,
because it's something that I like have a personal connection
to that I knew nothing about before I realized that
I had a small personal connection to Um, which look

(02:11):
into in a second, I imagine get you know, Eaves,
We're always looking for excuses to work on stuff together.
You are a well known podcast, you're an executive producer
now you also write frequently for The Bitter Southerner, which
is a fantastic literary magazine down here in the Southeast.
And when we were talking off air, we're saying, well,

(02:34):
you know, we're hanging out, what kind of story do
we want to explore together? Peek behind the curtain, folks.
Eaves always has the best topics. So usually it's true.
Usually when we're talking about collaborating on something, I UM
and Eves I hope you don't think I'm lazy for
doing this. I just defer to you, and I'm like, well,

(02:55):
what should we what? What are you? What's on your mind?
And you came with this idea which, again, as we
had said, it's something that I and and probably many
other people maybe no a little bit about, like the
first paragraph of Wikipedia level or the headline level. But
what what is our story today and and what what

(03:18):
inspired you to look into it? Well, first off, I
don't want I want to say that that is not
lazy of you, because I mean, I think we're most
well attuned to talking about the things we actually care about.
So I feel like it's better for everybody for me
to come with something that I'm actually interested in. So
I'm gonna take that. I'm gonna roll it back, roll
that stuff self deprecation back for you, and gonna say
that it's not lazy. Um, but we're gonna be talking

(03:41):
about turpentine today and my connection to it. Okay, I
feel like I worked it up a bit by saying
I have a personal connection. It's not that deep. It's
just that my mom told me one day that my
grandmother who's now passed, but she used to give my
mom turpentine like to ingest it. And I was asking
my mother a little bit more about it, and she said, oh, well,
I think it was you know, she would give it

(04:02):
to me when I felt sick or down, are are
ill in some way, And I really don't know much.
I don't know much more about how and why my
grandmother gave my mom's turpentine. But I was like, hmmm,
turpin tine. I mean, I think we all have those
those families stories where we hear about the folk remedies
and the specific to family remedies, and we know that

(04:25):
herbal medicine was big for a lot of people today still,
but specifically within black families, herbal medicine is something that's
pretty important because it's like what we had access to
and the things and because of government distrust and so
many other things um in that vein. But that's where
I got into it. So I was like, there has
to be more to this story, because there's always more

(04:46):
to the story, and I was just curious, and to
be quite frank, I was kind of ashamed that I
didn't know more about the history of turpentine in the
South because I'm from the South. I was born and
Carolina raised in Georgia, some very southern girl, and I
was like, I should know more about his history. But

(05:07):
I'm being hard on myself, of course, because there's so
much that we don't know in this world, and whenever
we get an opportunity to learn more about it than
than we do, we do that that is inspirational, Eaves,
and I would agree, I think you are being a
little hard on yourself because I can tell you this, I,
like many people in the audience today, after our initial conversation,

(05:30):
I thought, yeah, I remember this, and then I was
excited about our story today, and then it occurred to me,
I was like, what is turpentine? You know? Like I like,
I've heard of it and I remember it being referenced
in things, and I know it has a number of
different industrial uses. But you're absolutely right. I love the

(05:51):
point you're bringing up to um. A lot of people
don't acknowledge that in historically oppressed and this enfranchised communities,
there's a synthesis or almost a syncretism of known, established
natural remedies for things meeting with institutional racism, like the

(06:16):
systemic discrimination against black populations that occurs in the medical
community today. Even so, it's funny because I didn't know
that your personal experience as a folk remedy, it's not
It's not an uncommon one back in the day. And
I just so you don't feel alone in the grandmothers
and fulk remedies things. I'll confess to you. My grandmother,

(06:39):
one of my grandmother's, My family hails from Appalachia, so
I'm Southern by root as well. One of my grandmothers,
who is a teetotaler, kept whiskey around in the house
as a medicinal thing, and one more than once I
had an earache and she put whiskey in my ear. Wow,
how do you think that? How do you think that

(07:01):
affected you? Do you think that there are any side
effects you can point to later in life? Now, well,
I'm probably going to our number one bar and chicken
wings spot the local after this. I'll probably drink whiskey,
but I'll try with my mouth this time. That's funny,
um No. But also to be clear, I'm not denigrating

(07:22):
folk remedies at all. Like, of course, there's a lot
of breath of folk remedies, and some of them work
for some things. Some of them don't work for other
Some of them are probably things you shouldn't do, period,
but there is validity to a lot of them legitimacy.
And I am a big proponent of making sure that
we honor that kind of secondary knowledge that we have,
you know, and also remember to think about who studied,

(07:45):
who was doing the studying. When it comes to things
that are actually verified by you know, longitudinal studies and mainstream,
you know, widely accepted science, it's like, who was studied
in those studies and and how are they being legitimized?
And so I think there's just a lot of depth
when it comes to things like giving your children turpentine

(08:05):
and whiskey. And it's not to say that that the
people who were doing these things were ignorant. They weren't stupid,
they weren't even misguided necessarily. It's just, you know, a
matter of what work for them, and what they had
access to and what they had knowledge of. So I
think that's the case in turpentine. And I'm not completely
clear on this and my specific family history, but I
just felt I was like, well, turpentine was huge in

(08:26):
the South. There must be some sort of convenience element here.
Where it was like, that's what my grandmother gave my mother.
Because it was still prevalent. You know, people always heard
about it, people heard about The one thing that came
up when it to its medicinal use was having purgative qualities,
which is like, that's something that you know you often
need to do, is purge when you're sick. So yeah,

(08:46):
it's just it was there, and so that's something that
I wonder about, and it kind of let me deeper
into this hole of just wondering how it moved through
the South and what its effect was and and how
that came to be. So yeah, it has plenty of
function too, like outside of medicinal remedies. And also from
what I understand, it's not just ingested orally for medicinal purposes, right,

(09:11):
It's also it's almost like a vixed vapor rub sometimes. Yes,
So when I was taking notes on it, when I
was reading about all the things it's been used for,
I was like, it's kind of like an all like
all purposes baking soda, because I used baking soda for
everything in my house. I'm like, oh my god, I
love baking, so I've been give it to me. But
it's kind of seems like people treated turpentine in that way. Um. So,

(09:31):
some of the things that it's been used in is paint, center, varnishes, furniture, wax,
lamp oils. The list really goes on and on when
it comes to the person has been used externally and
internally for things like hemorrhages, epilepsy, yellow fever, tapeworm, rheumatism,
respiratory disease, so so many different things. Also has been

(09:55):
described as having been used rectily for people with worms,
hemorrhages and stuff your gas. So it wasn't it wasn't
just topical and ingested through the mouth as well, So
there was a lot of variation in how it was
taken into the body. So yeah, household items, you know,
in an industrial processes and in medicinal practices. It's just
kind of like an all encompassing thing. And when I

(10:18):
was looking it up, ingesting turpentine was in the news
a few years ago because Tiffany Hattish brought it up saying,
I put it on sugar cubes or something, and I
take it. It's great. I use it for the cold colds,
I use it for all these things. And it was
a rash of like you know, cautionary articles that came
up after that saying don't do it. You know, turpentine
or turpentine can be like, you know, terrible for you,

(10:42):
especially particularly in large doses. It has side effects and
smaller doses as well though, So yeah, it can you know,
lead to things like bleeding in the lungs, kidney damage,
and I don't think death is that common, but of
course anything not in moderation, you know, it can can
be it. And that's the case with turpentine. So when

(11:03):
you and I were looking into the history of this substance,
you know, just to be clear when for anyone wondering
what is turpentine, it's a form of distilled resin right
from tree shap. Yes, yes it is. So there's a
whole process um that we can get into when it
comes to actually describing how turpentine is extracted from trees.

(11:28):
But it comes from pine trees and the work can
be pretty laborious, but it does take skill to do it,
Like there's specialized knowledge that you kind of need to
have to be able to work in it, as are
so many things. You know, you do something for a
long time and you're immersed in it. Then you have
this knowledge that seems very easy to the people who
are doing it for so long, but outside of it,

(11:49):
it's it's not. That's not necessarily the case. So you
extract it from trees. They have different parts of the
process called boxing, where you cut a hole in the
tree and then cornering and then the sap kind of
bleeds or not staff excuse me, the gum bleeds from
the tree, and it's collected in those boxes. And then

(12:09):
the workers would go and collect that from the trees
in buckets, and then they would take the buckets and
they would dump those into barrels, and then it would
be transported off and turned into other things from there.
So the tree is an amazing resource for so many things.
You know. Once more, the thing that we're really you know,
exploiting the tree for turns into so many other things

(12:31):
that have so many uses for us in our cushy existences. Yes, yes,
so I love that you're talking about the process of finding, collecting, distilling,
creating turpentine, because our story today is not just I
want to be candid, this is a story that like

(12:53):
I knew almost nothing about. I knew that turpentine was
made in the South. Like I knew the American South
is one of the places that would create turpentine. But
other than that, I was tabu larassa. I had no.
I had no idea that there is such a long
and deep story that you know, you could argue has

(13:16):
ripple effects here in the modern day in one, especially
in our neck of the global woods. So what you know,
when we say, when we say this story, I feel
like I'm beating beating around the pine tree here. So
we know turpentine, it's been produced in the American South,
and it's like our story is a little bit more
about that than it is about turpentine the substance. So

(13:39):
do you want to kick us off here? Eves? Where
where are we traveling to? Back in time? Okay, so
picture this? No, I'm just kidding U. Though. The history
is very long and very rich, long sect relatively obviously,
because the US is you know, the history of the
US as a quote unquote nation is pretty sure in

(14:00):
the history of the South, you know, goes back only
a certain amount of time, but within that time span
since we started, since we became a nation, since the
American Revolution, the whole history of turpentine in the US
South goes back to before then, so to the seventeen
hundreds and went up to today. It still has effects.
So there's a whole history which we don't need to
get into, of how turpentine was produced here. It was

(14:24):
often very low quality. But we when we were in colonies,
you know, we would we had a whole setup. We
were shipping back to Europe because their whole situation over
there wasn't the best where they were getting their supply from.
And so they said, we have colonies, you know, why
don't we just get them to do it. Look at
all these forests that are there. So that's kind of
where the industry started, and then it picked up a
lot from there. It peaked in the later eighteen hundreds

(14:46):
to the early nineteen hundreds. But that, like I said,
that history spanned from like the seventeen hundreds on up
to the nineteen sixties and seventies, and then the remnants
of those things are still in place today when comes
to what the population looks like and what the land
looks like. And I think the story the larger story
here and that what you know, I think you're trying

(15:07):
to get at is that there is so much wrapped
up in in it in the history of turpentine in
the US South, because it was related to race, the
story was related to economics, the still the story was
related to the social and cultural history of the region
and of the land itself. You know, you have to imagine,

(15:28):
I mean, if if we're telling a story about a
natural resource in the South, that those things will be
wrapped up into it. So I think when we first
started talking about this, people are probably like, yeah, I
could imagine there's probably gonna there's probably gonna be some
sort of history of all those things in there, because
that's just what the era and the region lends itself to.

(15:48):
And then that is the case. Um. So just to
kind of set up the definition in the beginning here,
is that there were naval stores, is what they call them.
And they called them naval stores, and you know that's
related to the history of the turpentine camps um. But
they call them naval stores because they were products that

(16:09):
were used in ship building, and they came from the
long leaf and slash pine trees. Those were the best
trees that they could work from, and really the long
leaf was the preferred tree that people would like to
use for these naval stores, but the term naval kind
of just did relate to that industry, even though the
products were used in different industries, because it was used

(16:30):
so much in ship construction and maintenance and that was
kind of the focus of where those supplies were being
sent at the time, and that included tar, raw turpentine,
and then their derivatives, which is spirits of turpentine and
then rosen and pitch. This does tie into, as you said,
some complex sociocultural things that have to be addressed and

(16:54):
should be given i think more space and conversation. So
when we're looking at like as as you said, here,
we're we're picturing ourselves as England back in the day
for a world concrete empire. They definitely needed a lot
of foreign resources. So a lot of the stuff that
England was doing as an empire was based on resource extraction,

(17:16):
was based on being able to you know, control colonial
populations to bring to England the stuff that they didn't
have on their archipelago. So if we imagine the time
period we're describing, and we're looking at the South in particular,
then we see a huge agricultural industry and it's often

(17:39):
mono agricultural, right. We've got some like plantation owners who
are focusing entirely on using forced labor to grow like
a single crop, you know, whether that is cotton, whether
that is like in the Caribbean, it might be sugarcane,
stuff like that. And several of these plantation owners, from

(18:03):
what I understand, around the time there were improvements in
the distillation process in the eighteen thirties, several of those
folks started looking at or those institutions started looking at
the demand for what was known as naval stores and thinking,
you know, pardon my French, Holy pine trees are everywhere. Yes, absolutely, yeah,

(18:32):
So pine trees are everywhere. If you're not familiar with
the US South, there's a bunch of pine forests in
the coastal plain of what were the Southern Colonies are
the U s South States now, and there was a
lot of long leaf pine. As I said, that was
a preferred species. So it stretched through the forest in Virginia,
through North and South Carolina, through the Florida Panhandle and

(18:53):
the northern Peninsula of Florida, and through southern Alabama and
Mississippi and parts of Louisiana and Texas. So this whole
kind of if you just draw that backwards ill along
the coast of the eastern and southern United States, that's
where a lot of the long leaf pine was and
a lot of those forces were great for just exploiting
for the purposes of naval stores. And as you said, well, okay,

(19:18):
let me let me first say this is an aside,
but honestly, one thing that I liked about digging into
this is that I despise pine trees. So so like,
as you said, we have a lot, and there are
a lot in my backyard, and when I moved to
this place, I had like five of them cut down.
I was just like, oh, you know, because they were, um,

(19:40):
this sounds very privileged and it is, but like you know,
if they're very tall, and so their hazards as well.
But they just shed so much. So one aside of
like digging into this was me really gaining a greater
appreciation for the pine. But that just leads into me saying,
we have a lot of them here. And the naval
stores industry first dive looked on a large scale in

(20:01):
North Carolina the abundance of naval stores that were produced
in this day is the thing that gave it his nickname,
the tar Hill state um and the first to the
workers who were covered in tar and pitch. So yes,
there was a lot of overlap between well. Slaves were
involved in in the naval stores industry highly highly heavily
before the Civil War they made up most of the workforce.

(20:25):
But yes, plantation owners also play a big role in it,
so they controlled a large portion of the naval stores industry.
In the South, a significant percentage of the manufacturers owned
more enslaved people than the average slave owner did. And
in a book called Tapping the Pines by Robert Outland
the third he says that of all manufacturers owned more

(20:49):
enslaved people than average slave owners, and many on two
to three times as many. So they were very intertwined.
And in South Carolina and in North Carolina especially league
conditions were perfect for profiting from tar making because in
North Carolina there weren't many other export commodities that could
compete with enaval stores, and lumber wasn't as profitable there,

(21:12):
and naval stores could also there were this thing that
could be worked throughout the year, so conditions were just perfect.
In North Carolina for that being a successful production space
for them, and it just you know, blew up in
the South from there kind of moved south and west
as they the destruction. You know, imagine like just a

(21:34):
path of destruction from North Carolina and down when it
came to the pine forests, because once they ran out,
they went to the next place. And it's like, we
gotta make more money, we gotta we gotta continue this industry.
So we're just gonna, you know, do it where we
can just keep keep moving. So it's like economically driven
natural disaster. Yes, I mean yes, and it's and it

(21:55):
has still you know, shows its effects today. There were
things that happened, like for us that in grow back
and towards the end of it, they had to use
younger pines which weren't as great for the industry, and
so many things like that. But that is some of
the background of the like you know, the way that
it started and it and it continued to move throughout
the South. One thing I did want to go back

(22:15):
to because I want you to know, I'm a big
nature lover. Ye, I wanted to from that perspective. I
wanted to reassure you there's nothing wrong with hating. Okay,
thank you, not one. It just needs to be said aloud,
like especially the really tall ones. Yes, if you've ever

(22:36):
if you've ever been in the south there lived near
a pine forest, and seeing those things in a storm
or implement weather, it's not cool. Yeah, they wave everywhere,
They're very bendy, and they also have a really instead
of a really deep root system that's more vertical, they
have a really shallow, a comparatively shallow roots system that
goes across so you can see. So if you hit

(22:58):
the wrong kind of storm and down here you can
see a pine tree, just move from vertical the horizontal
pretty quickly, take a little bit of dirt with it,
and just say, hey, I'm glad my car wasn't there.
So I think you're I think you're doing all to day.
I think you're spot on. And then and the sap,
the sap or the gum or whatever you call it,

(23:19):
it's everywhere, it's everywhere. The needles are insane. And yeah,
so I too, am a nature lover, but I like
to respect them from a distance. You know, I'm kind
of like halst nature. I'm still half city girl because
I grew up in the Atlanta area, So it's like
in my backyard. Cool. But I love hiking. I love
like being entrenched in the forest. So I'm like, yeah,
y'all are great there, but here, you know, we can

(23:41):
we can love each other at a distance. That's how
I feel. Yeah, I'd like it. Uh yeah, that's that's
how I prefer possums for instance. Also, it's very common here.
I'm like, you know, it's awesome that you're alive over there, bro,
It's awesome, awesome. So what we're seeing is a pattern
that has occurred with multiple other industries that occurs today

(24:05):
with things like the palm oil industry, right, which is
going through huge swaths of wilderness and back in the
period of time in the area of the world that
you're describing, we see. I love that you describe as
that backwards l because that's really that really is how
it how the pattern seems to expand. This occurs concurrently

(24:27):
with the rise of what we would call turpentine labor camps,
like turpentine camps, meaning that these are populations people entirely
dedicated to the turpentine naval stores industry. Like it's not
like something where the workers live at a camp seasonally,
because as you said, this is a year round business.

(24:49):
People and their families are living at a main camp
until the resources exhausted. Is that correct, Yes, that is correct,
and then once those resource is exhausted, they would just
kind of move on to the next place. And there
were it was a little bit a little bit different
before the Civil War and then after the Civil War
because of emancipation specifically, but it wasn't that different. Um.

(25:13):
There were things that changed, like technology and the way
production happened, but a lot of as we know within
in general, you know, we know about the direct line
from slavery to mass incarceration. Um, So a lot of
the practices that were done under enslavement still happened after emancipation.
And that was the case in the turpentine industry. So

(25:34):
just to kind of describe the way it was for
a second. And as you said, the turpentine camps, which
were these camps that were specifically dedicated to extracting the
gum from the trees and so they weren't really involved
in the distillation process. They would send those that raw
turpentine away for other people to deal with. The also,

(25:54):
you know, in their own ways terrible and grueling and
laborious and hazardous, often processes that came with working in
the stills. But yes, so at the camps themselves, the
conditions were pretty poor and before the Civil War there
were a lot of enslaved people who were um, I

(26:17):
was gonna say employed, but they were not employed because
they were not paid. The enslaved people who worked the camps,
and there were also more impoverished white people who worked there,
and there were also immigrants, specifically Eastern European immigrants that
would work the camps, but it was largely enslaved people,
and it was also very largely men versus women and children.

(26:39):
Women and children really weren't super involved at the Turpentine camps,
but you know, there were workers would go through this process.
They would have long days of doing the boxing and
doing the cornering and doing the scraping and all of
the various processes that came along with the actual work
of laboring with the trees. And housing was crude because

(27:03):
it was meant to be temporary, because you know, like
we talked about, the production was just open move after
one place was exploited, and there were a couple of
different systems that were used when it came to life
and working in the camps, well in under slavery in general,
which was the task system and the gang system. So
in the gang system, enslaved people were just kind of

(27:25):
assigned work and they were expected to do it as
a group. And then under the task system, which is
what happened mostly at Turpentine camps, individual enslaved people worked
at and it got an assigned job because you have
to imagine, you know, we know what the forces are
like today, their dents, they're huge, and they were even
more so then, and they were very isolated. And people

(27:48):
worked in those in the Turpentine camps under that task system,
which gave them relative keyword, relative relative autonomy versus how
it was under the sang system because they were assigned
the task individually and they worked in more of a
spread out way than they would do so where they
have more close communication under something like a gang system.

(28:11):
So just imagine these people working the trees, using their tools,
having their gallon buckets, being out here in a very
socially isolated way, and you know, being subject of course
to the things that happened under enslavement in other industries,
like there was a gross, a very gross and calculated

(28:31):
balance of punishment and reward for work. So punishments of
physical pain would be the ones that made them increase
their effort but did not promote carefulness. And then when
it came to rewards, they were the things that increased
care rather but reduced efforts. So these same sort of
mental manipulative things that happened under enslavement also happened ends

(28:56):
the turpentine camps. And then the overseers were called woods rider,
which is honestly a great word. It's just not like
I love that word itself, but everything else that it
entails and that is underneath that word is not great.
But woods Riders sounds like, I don't know, something out
of a fantasy novel, I think is why big vibes like.

(29:19):
It's like I was thinking the same thing, you know
what I mean, where it would not be out of
place in song device and the woods Riders arrive at
exactly send the woods Riders, but yes, um, but less cool.
They were overseers. They rode through the forest on horses,

(29:42):
and they were see to it that workers were doing
their jobs. So yeah, um, I could go on and
on about the conditions there, but I won't, but just
as an example of what they had to deal with
and indoor because of the labor that they were doing
and it the way it was set up is that,
for instance, there was it was hard to get clean

(30:04):
running drinking water in the forests, especially during draw spills.
The stuff that was there was stagnant obviously, stuff you
don't want to get like dysentery and time and like
other things that are bad that come from um drinking
bad water. I don't even know if dysenterry is one
of those things, uh, parasites whatever, um. So they didn't
have clean running water, so sometimes they would use straws

(30:26):
that they brought in didn't drink the water that was
collected in turpentine boxes, the boxes that were in the trees,
which as we know, can Ingesting turpentine can lead to
intestinal and abdominal issues, so it's likely that this caused
some sickness in them, but was probably not fatal. But
there were other hazardous conditions that came with working in

(30:46):
the camps and later the stills, because fires and explosions
were common in the stills, because of the type of
work that it was, because of what they were dealing with.
And then there was a wildlife like just what we
you know, what we would all deal with in the forests,
like the snakes and the ticks, um. And then there
was the heat and the humidity of the region. And
then there was the expansiveness of the forest, which meant

(31:08):
that the people would get lost sometimes. There were stories
of workers getting lost in the woods, and you know
there there was a story of one guy who got
lost in then he eventually died because he had hunger
and thirst. So yeah, um, not great conditions at all.
And you're also being exploited in so many other ways

(31:28):
beyond just the condition of the work itself. Yeah, and
this so I have to say, eaves that the description
and I don't know why, but especially the idea of
someone being lost lends itself well to a horror story plot.
You know. Yes, I am like this is like, this

(31:55):
is something that I'm working on right now, honestly, Like
I I don't know about horrors per se, but I
think about this a lot because I also um for
people who don't know. But I know, you know, Ben,
I camp and I backpack, so I do spend a
lot of time in the woods and like reckoning with
fear that comes with being in the woods, especially as
a person who is like largely sheltered because I live

(32:17):
such a privileged life. You know, I have a house. Um,
a lot of people don't have that. You know, I
have food and the half of the table, and so
it's just like it throws you out of your element
and then you realize that this is just people's day
to days, still today and was in the past in
so many different ways, under so many different circumstances, and
so yes, it's it's like a horror. It's it's it's horror,

(32:40):
it's terror because as the horror of the landscape to
the terror of society that was being you know, you
were being affected at um affected by at the time,
and it's just yeah, brutal and horrifying. So yes, that
is a good way to describe it. Yeah, it's it's
a it's a harrowing experience. And you know, earlier you

(33:02):
hit on something that I always love to bring up
on the show. We're talking about just like full remedies,
the idea. You know, it's it's tempting for people in
one or the modern era to look back at events
of yesteryear and look kind of a skance at them
or down their noses at the people involved. But the

(33:24):
people who are alive in these times and centuries in
millennia past were no different from us. They were just
as intelligent, and they were just as fallible. They were
worked like us. They were working with the information they have.
So whenever I hear somebody say something like, oh, it's
dumb that people didn't know insert fact here and blah

(33:45):
blah blah blah blah, but my question is what is
always what dumb stuff are we doing right now? Or
what stuff are we doing that future historians will look
back on as ridiculous. One of my nominees is neckties.
I know this might not affect you as much as
it affects me, but it's just why are we still
doing this? Why are we insisting upon this charade? But anyway,

(34:07):
that has nothing to do with it. And I do
know the history. I think it's like certain Bosnian soldiers, Yeah,
they're like, what do you call the vestigial organs or
you know, like those things that that that we still have.
We're like, I don't need those like um, So I
have to think about that a little bit longer because
I feel like there are a lot of things that
I ball at. Then I'm like, this makes no sense,

(34:27):
like why are we doing this this way? But I
would definitely have to think about that. I know one thing.
I don't think this is that related, but I always
think about batteries. I just feel like we're never moving
fast enough with batteries and people are And if you're drinking,
I'm like, why are you? Why are you still plugging
things in with chords? Why are you? Why are we
still here? Why does it take an hour for you?

(34:48):
You know? I feel like maybe that's kind of related,
But I have to think about that a little bit more,
and I'll come back to you. That we live in
a world of wires, you and me, especially right now,
just because we're we have our homes setups, and I
think about that too. I'm like, you know what's gonna
stand out in films that are set in this time period.
It's gonna be the wires, It's gonna be everything. Like

(35:11):
another thing. Um, I don't want to guess too far
off topic, but another example that I think you might
enjoy or might terrify you next time you're driving is
future historians are going to think, I'm not going to
overuse this word, but are going to think it is
ridiculous and cartoonish that we hopped in these metal machines

(35:32):
that can go over eighty miles an hour and we're
within like three feet of each other going at this
speed and it's all supposed to be fine because there's
this honor system of painted lines on the road. And
if you try to explain this to someone from the future,
the first question would be like, oh, that's crazy. How
did it stop people from hitting each other? And your

(35:54):
answer has to be he didn't. Human error still existed. Yeah,
I've one feel you on that. And also not to
go too much on a tangent, but it's something that
I think about a lot because I think about how
okay this is, this is very deep into my my
personal thought world. But okay, but how how much we feel,

(36:17):
say I feel like as human beings, as human humanity,
Like sometimes in society we can a lot of times
say that we don't trust people, but like every day
we wake up and step outside of the house, we
have to infinitely trust everybody else that we come in
contact with to not destroy us. Like the one thing
that we can say we have in this life, I
think is trust, because otherwise we will be in a

(36:38):
corner all day long. And even that like this can
be fuzzy. So I actually think about you know, I
think about stuff like that a lot. Like we yes,
we do have to rely on other people just doing
the right thing and making a mistake, just buy their
own valiability, not not even on purpose. And when we

(37:03):
take when we take this back to the idea of
the Turpentine camps, even after you know, I feel like
it's something that thankfully everybody can acknowledge now, even after
the legal passage of emancipation, I would argue, even in
areas of the South where people knew it was coming,

(37:24):
you know, people who were like had the reigns of
society at the time when they knew it was coming,
even before it had passed, they were already working assiduously
to create laws that made the day to day situation
still the same. And you know, for anyone who doesn't know,
it's heartbreaking that there were there were many, many communities,

(37:46):
communities of people who were enslaved who did not learn
about emancipation until years and years after the fact, because
that information was withheld from them. This happens like this
is uh something that has to be acknowledge. We're talking
about this turpentine story because as you said, Eves, so
their emancipation happens, right, And there are people in communities,

(38:11):
some some very large camps. But like imagine you're a worker,
you work at a turpentine camp and you've been there
for years. As you said, this is a very not
to be too liam neesent about it, but it's a
very specific set of skills. Like if you're listening to
this and you don't have experience trying to do this,

(38:32):
then you're going to have a bad time for your
first like year. And I don't know exactly, I don't
know exactly how the apprenticeship worked because something that I
was thinking about as I was reading how they did that,
this was like what was the first once the ax
or you know the book it was handed to you, Like,

(38:53):
how did that look? How did you you know there
was There had to be a first time that you
did this thing, and it required skill and pract just
so I just wonder about that. But yes, um, it
looked very different before and after the Civil War, and
some of these practices continued, and some of those things
that they did was debt, peonage and convicts leasing. Well,

(39:13):
I feel like there's a better way to say that,
but the leasing of people who were considered convicts because
they have been convicted of a crime. So that developed
in the wake of emancipation, and the practices and the
people that were under them were subject to abuse. And
the link here and I always love when things are
like they have some link to me, even if they're

(39:35):
not great. It just makes history feel more real, you know,
And for me, that was that the leasing of people
who were convicted of crimes was very, very prevalent in Georgia. Well, okay,
it wasn't as prevalent as debt peonage was, but as
far as the places in the South, they happened a
lot in Georgia and Florida. So there were of course

(39:55):
other industries that relied on peonage as well. There were
past laws outlining outlawing it in the eighteen sixties, but
it continued in practice, as so many things do. Just
because something is outlawed doesn't mean that that the processes
and institutions just disappear all of a sudden. So it
was kind of you can think of as a continuation
of enslavement ponages when laborers have to pay off a

(40:19):
debt with work, and then sometimes those debts were paid
off quickly, and more often than not, workers got stuck
in that debt servitude when they couldn't repay the debt,
and then the ponage happened when they couldn't leave the
company the job because the producer was stopping them from
doing that. In some way, I was waiting for this
party is because this is this is coming up. You know,

(40:40):
history may not always repeat, but it rhymes. I was
thinking about company towns recently because there was some legislation
being floated in Nevada to create what they called innovation
zones and they were going to let tech companies fill
the role of local government. And I was I was
one of the hopefully many people just trash talking in

(41:02):
on the internet like there's no one remember the songs
like sixteen tons, like this is a bad look. And
what you've described here beautifully is this this horrific system.
It's like you're trapped in a Dave and Busters or
Chuck E Cheese, but instead of playing games and getting
paid in tokens. You do backbreaking labor and you still

(41:25):
get paid in tokens, and that's not real money. It's specie.
Your script. We've talked about the back we've talked about
in back episodes. But imagine like so, from what I understand,
and this is some of the research use, it means,
from what I understand, you would get a small living space.
It would not be a very well constructed living space.

(41:46):
You would get paid in whatever your fake currency was
on a monthly basis, and you would I think in
the early nineteen hundreds the amount you got paid was
based on how many trees you have. But the only
way you could buy things you needed, like the only
way you could buy Maybe in some cases the labor

(42:08):
camps actually provided you know, the turpentine related tools, but
as far as like your clothing, as far as your food,
other materials you would buy or other resources, you had
no choice because that isolation you talked about. You had
no choice other than the company store. It was not
a Walmart. It wasn't like you couldn't take a bus somewhere.

(42:29):
Um and those company stores specifically ad prices structured to
encourage debt peonage, so that it was too in the
mind of those what you call them producers, the system
is broken if people are able to get out of it,
which is insidious. It is honestly absurd. You know. It's
like it's like the bucket with a hole in the bottom.

(42:51):
It's like it's just it makes no sense, but it
makes sense to them because the producers are the ones
who profit, and that's all the other concerned about. And
they don't care who gets exploited in the process. And
you know, from from the smallest exploitation to you know,
fatality um. And so the debt would actually you explain
that perfectly by the way ben and the debt would

(43:13):
start as soon as people were hired through things like
advanced wages. So, like I said earlier, some of those
people were immigrants who were coming from places like New York,
and so there was a whole exploit exploitative system there too.
And the way that they recruited these people and they
set them up to go to the South and they're
like these people coming from a strange, stranger's land, you know,
coming to the United States, and they're like, I get

(43:35):
this opportunity, you know, just put yourself in their place.
And so you know, they would be like, Okay, you know,
I'm gonna go do this work, and it will be
a total reversal when you got there and realized how
situation the situation actually was. So they would get these
advanced wages. Mind you, these these immigrants who were coming
would have to pay things like the transportation would have

(43:55):
to be paid for like, so the indebtedness started even
there um. But for people who weren't immigrants, who are
already in the area and didn't necessarily have to go
through that route, they would be set up with advanced
wages as well. So they would use to get food
from the commissary. So it would start off like that
and it would continue like that. So they would continue
to use debt to keep these workers underneath their thumbs.

(44:17):
So in the book I was talking about earlier, that
kind of explained as this line between freedom and and
un freedom, you know, between freedom and enslavement. Because of
the way it was set up, it was like, yeah,
you're in debt, and maybe you're you're just constantly in debt.
There were oftentimes that the workers would owe the producers
hundreds of dollars and so they would continue on their

(44:39):
work in that debt, so it was just a rolling cycle.
So the workers would get these tokens you would talk
about to purchase supplies, and then the account was debited
and then at the end of the month, the wages
were applied to the accounts. Okay, you get the wages,
and then maybe the wages were more than the debit,
so maybe you got that difference, but you would get
in in commissary screw you know, the fig money. But

(45:00):
if it was even you know, if there was no
credit on your part, you would have to borrow again
to pay for the next month's expenses. So they owe
their employers, you know, it can be hundreds of dollars.
And then what happened was and this is where the
pianage comes in, when they would try to leave. That's
when the worker could be like, Okay, maybe I'll let
you leave, but your new employment has to pay me

(45:21):
and they'll be fine. And then the other option was
that they were like, uh, you need to stay and
if you leave, I'm gonna bring you back, and then
not do it and not follow up on that, and
then they could follow up on that. It's like the
third thing that would happen is that they would be like,
you're not leaving, and I'm going to physically keep you
from leaving, and if you do leave, I'm gonna forcibly
bring you back, just like you know, back in the

(45:42):
days of enslavement, where they would send people off to
bring enslaved people back. So it was, it was it's
just gross, like it's growth. Like, there's not really another
way to describe it. Yeah, it's just really disgusting. I agree,
And we see, you know again, we see that pattern
where you know, there are protective laws written at a

(46:06):
federal state level in different places, but these laws, as
well intentioned as they may sound on paper, they don't
seem to have a lot of heft or teeth when
it comes to these historically disadvantaged communities, these rural areas
where corruption is it's a stereotype, but it's it's a

(46:30):
true stereotype. Unfortunately, corruption is endemic like it is. It
would be weird for the local law enforcement not to
just follow the lead of the richest guy in town,
right because they work together as fingers on a hand,
they're part of this system that uh, the vultron is up.

(46:51):
And then if someone from outside, like if someone from
d C says, uh, you know, I like, hey, we
wrote a law about this. Then they'll just say, oh, yeah, no, totally,
that's absolutely what we're doing. And then they'll just wait
until that contention is gone and they'll be back to
their same unclean business. One thing that you set up
perfectly is at the top of this episode, you know,

(47:12):
you said, we see the effects of this in the
modern day. Could we maybe talk a little bit about
how these naval stores and turpentine camps declined, uh, and
and like why why you You probably won't know a
bunch of people working at one today for sure. Okay.

(47:34):
So I guess I kind of start at the place
where you mentioned the laws that were happening. So there were,
like you said, laws that were like, okay, I'm gonna
try to keep you from doing this. As we move
into the late eighteen hundreds and the early nineteen hundreds,
there was more movement when it came to people challenging debt, peonage,
challenging the fact that this was forced labor, that that

(47:55):
was the thing that was keeping the naval stores industry alive,
and there were people who were speaking up about it
and the treatment of people in these camps and the
brutality that was happening, because we didn't even get much
into that, but it's like, you know, you know, just
imagine there were terrible things that happened when it came
to the types of torturing and brutality. So all of
these things were kind of boiling up, like the consciousness
was happening there where it was Okay, this is this

(48:18):
is wrong, and we should probably try to do something
to stop it. And so that that had a hand
in the decline of the industry. A lot of the
producers were investigated for violating the thirteenth Amendment. Forced labor
was challenged, like I said, and so was the leasting
of people who were convicted of crimes. And at the
same time, the forces were being exploited and depleted. And

(48:41):
that was the case. But there were also some people
who were like, yeah, that's fine, you know, it's just
a sinus civilization. This is what's gonna happen. This is
what comes along with people developing the land and progressing
and things like that. But at the same time as that,
there were also technological advancements and production methods, and then
there was greater research and then there was more federal

(49:01):
assistance in the industry. So in that earlier kind of transition,
a lot of the federal stuff benefited the producers. But
then they're also came a point where it was like, okay,
like this is declining. You're losing your labor force. You
you're losing your your forced labor. You know. A lot
of the black people who were in the area were like,
there are all these other things that are happening that

(49:24):
would be way better for me than working in this horrifying,
low paying, exploitative debt servitude, you know, go on and
go on and so forth of a condition that you
don't want to work and live in. UM, it's not
really doing anything for you. So they found other alternatives
and other industries like timber. So there was a lot

(49:46):
of competition as well for the people who could do
this kind of work. And we're willing to do this
kind of work and we're forced or not. I don't
want to use the work force because it wasn't forced labor.
But this is the opportunities that were available to them.
So the industry really strull during the Great Depression, as
many industries did UM and they did get some economic
assistance from the government. Also of note related to this,

(50:08):
but the smallest side is that you can go on
the Library of Congress's website and look up some of
the posters and the audio that was related to the
turpentine workers in the turpentine industry. There was actually UH
federal theater project put on by the Works Progress Administration.
They had a play that was called Turpentine by a

(50:30):
guy named J. A. Smith and Peter Moral or Morale Yeah,
And on a poster for it, it says a tale
of the Florida Pine Forest and it was a three
act play in ten scenes that depicted the mistreatment of
black workers in turpentine southern labor camps. I know that
because of a summary. I have not seen the play.
Of course it was like the nineteen thirties, but I

(50:51):
am very interested in what that play was like. Like
I just when I saw that poster, I was like, oh,
like what I wish I could see that play, but um, yeah.
So just the point is that the effects of the
industry were such that they were even part of these
kind of representative and artistic conversations, Like people were talking
about the conditions of the camps in that consciousness was

(51:12):
rising and on more towards the decline. In the nineteen
thirties and forties, conditions were still bad and the gum
naval stores industry specifically suffered, while the wood naval stores
industries were kind of on the uprise, which was a
different mode of processing the would they would break the
stumps down and extract the resident from it in a

(51:35):
different way that was more focused on the machinery. It
didn't require as much human labor um and specialization of
labor to do that kind of work that was done
with the gum naval stores. The process that we talked
about and extracting from the trees very very arduous, very
intensive for the actual labor. So on top of that,

(51:57):
another hand in the decline was that the export market diminished,
So there were exports that were coming out of the
South and going to Europe. That market diminished, and so
on top of all, all of that mixed together is
what led to the decline. And so, like I said,
the production peaked in the late eighteen hundreds, in the

(52:19):
early nineteen hundreds and then continue to like sixties and seventies,
but after that point it was really it was basically
non existent, like you could find you know, a couple
here there, but it wasn't worth it. So there was
nothing that could be done there. And so today you
won't really see people who are working in gum naval

(52:40):
stores and working the land in this kind of way.
So that was very long, long explanation, but there were
a lot of things that led to it. Yeah, we
had a lot to wrap up though. You you dealed it. Uh,
you nailed it in amazingly concise way there, because you
know we've said it before on the show. But one
thing history really teaches us is that nothing exists and

(53:03):
nothing occurs in a vacuum. Right there is always, like
you said at the top, there's always more to the story.
And history really is a palam sest. You know, we
it's a conversation. We moved through it our day to
day basis. There's something interesting I I learned that I
wanted to use his way to to close our episode today, Eaves.

(53:27):
I had been you know, like you, I'm a big
fan of hiking. Give me a long weekend and just
like a place to wander through, right and I'll try
not to get lost too bad. But I was in
an area of Florida, where I saw trees that had
this very specific kind of vertical damage, as if something

(53:47):
had gone in and just like scooped a straight line
through it. And I didn't know what it was because
I just figured, you I was in a place with
creepy trees. I just accepted that because that's a is
not super enterprising that endeavor. And I thought, you know,
maybe some maybe it was the result of a natural event,

(54:09):
like maybe there have been a fire that the tree survived,
or maybe there have been years ago, like a lightning
strike or some something of that nature, because it didn't
look like an animal did it. But now when I've
been looking at these pictures of old growth forest in
Florida in particular, I'm starting to think maybe I had seen, um,
maybe I had seen a tree that have been used

(54:31):
as a turpentine tree. Is it possible that you can
still find those trees today? I think it is possible
because they left very very distinct marks on it. I've
seen people talk about the v shapes that they would
see near the bottom of the tree. That was the
marks that were left of that tree being used in
the turpentine process. And yeah, so I think that you

(54:55):
can still find those marks on the trees that are
these leftover remnants of a bygone time when they were
used for that purpose. So that's that's the way, Like,
that's a physical not just a physical, a living artifact
of history. Those trees in particular, I was gonna just say,

(55:17):
they're also also very living people you know who who
have a connection to it, even if they didn't work
in the industry specifically, you know, like I said, it's
more so faded out, you know, in the sixties and seventies,
but there were people who lived through it that are
still alive. And there are people who knew people who

(55:39):
lived through it, or were the family members of those
who lived through it, and they are still alive. So
if you do have the opportunity or know someone who
did work in the industry, like talk to them because
I'm sure they have a lot of stories. We didn't
get into it today, but there are, like I said,
there's audio, there are personal accounts and anecdotes of people

(55:59):
who worked in it. So yes, there are living, tangible,
physical remnants when it comes to the land um, when
it comes to industry, and when it comes to the
actual people who worked in it. I love that you
mentioned this, because it's something that we often forget the
importance of documenting experiences right of taking the lived and

(56:25):
oral knowledge of our elders. This is something that also
the federal government supported during the Great Depression to send
people out to collect folk ways, for instance, was one
of the specific projects, but there were many, many more. Uh,
And there's much more to this story. Please if you'd
like to learn more, check out Tapping the Pines the

(56:46):
Naval stores industry in the American South by Robert b Outland.
I believe, yes, that is it and eaves at this point,
in addition to thanking you again for coming on the
show and and classing us up a little bit, I've
gotta I've gotta ask. I know, inquiring minds would would
love to learn about your newest projects because it's been

(57:10):
it's been so long since you were you were last
with this on air. What's what's the scoop? What are
you working on? Yeah? So I think the last time
that I was here, I was hosting this Day in
History class and I was also hosting Unpopular, which are
two shows that are also about history. So you can
still go back and listen to those and check out

(57:30):
a lot of other cool events and people in history
that I am interested in. I think you might find
some interest in as well. But now I am an
executive producer, so I'm working on a lot of cool projects.
You can also today still catch me on stuff mom
never told you, which I think a lot of y'all
might be familiar with I am talking about. I'm also

(57:53):
talking about history on their women in history, specifically who
had first in history, so you can take me up
fair Also eping some other coal projects that you can
chick out, like Jill Scott Presents Data Ill the Podcast,
and others that I won't name. But if you want
to know anything else about me, you can check me

(58:13):
out on Instagram or on Twitter. I'm at Eve Jeff
Cote on Twitter and not apologizing on Instagram. And what's
us about this outro moment felt ridiculous historians is that
when Eve says she has upcoming projects that she can't
really talk about, that's a hundred percent true. Like it's
so true that if me or no where to say, hey,

(58:34):
what's what's the scoop, then the very like diplomatic answer
we would probably get is, oh, I can't wait to
tell you in a few months, so you're you're a mastermind. Eves,
thank you so much for coming on the show, and
you can't wait to hear more about these upcoming projects.
If you haven't heard Jay dot Ill in particular, I

(58:56):
do recommend that you check that out. Also check out
Eves Were and Stuff Mom Never told you, another fantastic
show with some recurring guests of ours here on Ridiculous History. Eaves,
I'm gonna leave the last word to you. That's right.
I'm doing the worst thing ever in improv. I've put
the spotlight on you. It could be anything you watch.

(59:18):
It can be you know. When I say the last word,
I could just be a word. There's just a word
you like, all right, Um, So I'll do a little
bit longer than the word a word, and I will
say that I really appreciate you having me here again today.
I just want to reiterate that because I have been
wanting to talk to somebody about this, and I am
glad that this has been an out for that. But

(59:39):
as a huge edit bonus, it's like a lot of
other people get to listen to me spew things, and
you got to like, we got to reflect that with
each other and then so many people will hopefully learn things.
So I'm just very appreciative that I get to share
this history and that I get to be the mouthpiece
for that. And I had a lot of fun too,
which is always a place, So thank you always. Yeah,

(01:00:03):
we're we're overdue, uh to go hang out post pandemic folks.
If the spirit moves you so, please head over to
Ridiculous Historians. Let us know some of your favorite folk
remedies of old. That's all for this week. We'll see
you next time.