Naval stores are all liquid products derived from conifers. These materials include rosin, tall oil, pine oil, and turpentine. Crude gum or oleoresin can be collected from the wounds of living pine trees.
The term naval stores originally applied to the organic compounds used in building and maintaining wooden sailing ships, a category which includes cordage, mask, turpentine, rosin, pitch and tar. These materials were originally used for water- and weather-proofing wooden ships. Masts, spars, and cordage needed protecting, and hulls made of wood required a flexible material, insoluble in water, to seal the spaces between planks. Pine pitch was often mixed with fibers like hemp to caulk spaces which might otherwise leak.
The Royal Navy relied heavily upon naval stores from American colonies, and naval stores were an essential part of the colonial economy. Masts came from the large white pines of New England, while pitch came from the longleaf pine forests of Carolina, which also produced sawn lumber, shake shingles, and staves.[2] In the early 1700s the British Crown was involved in the transplantation of Palatine refuges in Great Britain to the New York Province to produce naval stores.
Naval stores played a role during the American Revolutionary War. As Britain attempted to cripple French and Spanish capacities through blockade, they declared naval stores to be contraband. At the time Russia was Europe's chief producer of naval stores, leading to the seizure of 'neutral' Russian vessels. In 1780 Catherine the Great announced that her navy would be used against anyone interfering with neutral trade, and she gathered together European neutrals in the League of Armed Neutrality. These actions were beneficial for the struggling colonists as the British were forced to act with greater caution.[3]
Zallen tells in detail how turpentine (and rosin) are produced as naval stores.[4] Pine trees especially in North Carolina were tapped for sap which was doubly distilled to make turpentine and rosin (aka resin)–hence the name tar heels. The trees were scored with a ledge called a “box” to collect the sap. Large numbers of slaves were used to score the trees, collect and process the sap. Zallen describes this as industrial slavery–different from the more common vision of slaves in agriculture. By the 1840s camphine, a blend of turpentine and grain alcohol, became the dominant lamp fuel in the US. [Zallen prefers the camphene spelling.]
The pine trees of North Carolina were well suited to camphine production. The business also provided additional need for slaves as production expanded. Backwoods became more productive. Slaves were often leased in winter when agriculture was slower. The value of many was protected by life insurance. Wilmington, NC became a center of the camphene industry. In cities, gaslighting was also available, but used by the upper classes. Camphine was the fuel of the average family.
Zallen reports that after Ft. Sumter, turpentine producers were cut off from major markets. Emancipation left them without manpower to collect and process turpentine. The camps were flammable. Many were burned in William Tecumseh Sherman’s march from Savannah to Goldsboro, NC. Congress also imposed taxes on alcohol to pay for the Civil War. That made camphine more costly than kerosene. Kerosene first produced as coal oil became abundant after the discovery of oil in Pennsylvania.
The major producers of naval stores in the 19th and 20th century were the United States of America, and France, where Napoleon encouraged planting of pines in areas of sand dunes. In the 1920s the United States exported eleven million gallons of spirits. By 1927, France exported about 20 percent of the world's resin.[5]
Separation techniques
"Chipping" a pine tree in Georgia (c. 1915) to obtain sap
Today naval stores are recovered from the tall oil byproduct stream of Kraft process pulping of pines in the US, though tapping of living pines remains common in other parts of the world. Turpentine and pine oil may be recovered by steam distillation of oleoresin or by destructive distillation of pine wood. Solvent extraction of shredded stumps and roots has become more common with the availability of inexpensive naphtha. Rosin remains in the still after turpentine and water have boiled off.[6]
In polymer chemistry and materials science, a resin is a solid or highly viscous substance of plant or synthetic origin that is typically convertible into polymers. Resins are usually mixtures of organic compounds. This article focuses mainly on naturally occurring resins.
Turpentine is a fluid obtained by the distillation of resin harvested from living trees, mainly pines. Principally used as a specialized solvent, it is also a source of material for organic syntheses.
The Tar River is a river that is approximately 215 miles (346 km) long, in northeast North Carolina flowing generally southeast to an estuary of Pamlico Sound. The Tar River becomes the tidal Pamlico River once it passes under the U.S. Highway 17 Bridge in Washington, North Carolina.
Rosin, also known as colophony or Greek pitch, is a solid form of resin obtained from pine trees and other plants, mostly conifers, primarily through heating fresh liquid resin to vaporize the volatile liquid terpene components. Used widely in various industries and arts, rosin appears as a semi-transparent, brittle substance that ranges in color from yellow to black and melts at stove-top temperatures. Rosin consists mainly of resin acids, especially abietic acid, and is soluble in alcohol, ether, benzene and chloroform.
Dry distillation is the heating of solid materials to produce gaseous products. The method may involve pyrolysis or thermolysis, or it may not.
Oakum is a preparation of tarred fibers used to seal gaps. Its traditional application was in shipbuilding for caulking or packing the joints of timbers in wooden vessels and the deck planking of iron and steel ships. Oakum was also used in plumbing for sealing joints in cast iron pipe, and in log cabins for chinking. In shipbuilding it was forced into the seams using a hammer and a caulking iron, then sealed into place with hot pitch.
Weymouth Woods-Sandhills Nature Preserve is a North Carolina state park in Moore County, North Carolina in the United States. Located near Southern Pines, North Carolina, it covers 915 acres (3.70 km2) in the Sandhills region of the state.
Tar Heel is a nickname applied to the U.S. state of North Carolina and its people. It is also the nickname of the University of North Carolina athletic teams, students, alumni, and fans.
Pine tar is a form of wood tar produced by the high temperature carbonization of pine wood in anoxic conditions. The wood is rapidly decomposed by applying heat and pressure in a closed container; the primary resulting products are charcoal and pine tar.
Pinus roxburghii, commonly known as chir pine or longleaf Indian pine, is a species of pine tree native to the Himalayas. It was named after William Roxburgh.
The naval stores industry produces and markets products derived from the oleoresin of pine trees, including rosin, tall oil, pine oil, and turpentine. It does this by collecting and processing organic forest products refined from slash pine and longleaf pine trees. The naval stores industry was associated with the maintenance of the wooden ships and sailing tackle of pre-20th century navies, which were caulked and waterproofed using the pitch of the pine tree.
A ship chandler is a retail dealer who specializes in providing supplies or equipment for ships.
Tarring is protecting some types of natural fibre and wire rope by coating it with tar. Hemp rope, which was typically used for standing rigging, requires tarring. Manila and cotton ropes were used for running rigging and were not tarred as this would make the rope too stiff to run easily through blocks. Regular tarring at sea was required when sailing ships used hemp rope - once every 6 months for a ship on a long voyage.
Fatwood, also known as "fat lighter", "lighter wood", "rich lighter", "pine knot", "lighter knot", "heart pine", "fat stick" or "lighter'd" [sic], is derived from the heartwood of pine trees. The stump that is left in the ground after a tree has fallen or has been cut is the primary source of fatwood, as the resin-impregnated heartwood becomes hard and rot-resistant after the tree has died. Wood from other locations can also be used, such as the joints where limbs intersect the trunk. Although most resinous pines can produce fatwood, in the southeastern United States the wood is commonly associated with longleaf pine, which historically was highly valued for its high pitch production.
The physautotype was a photographic process, invented in the course of his investigation of heliography, by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce and Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre in 1832, in which images were produced by the use of lavender oil residue dissolved in alcohol as the photographic agent. The solution was coated onto a silver or glass plate and allowed to dry, after which it had a powdery white appearance. The plate was then exposed in a camera obscura for about 8 hours and developed with petroleum-based spirit vapors, which caused the least strongly exposed areas to become proportionally more transparent, creating a photographic image that was positive when viewed against a darker background.
In plantation forests in parts of Europe, the tree stumps left after felling are now sometimes pulled out of the ground to supply wood fuel for biomass power stations. The stump is the base of the trunk and the attached woody roots. Tree stumps and roots are extracted using a hydraulic head on a tracked excavator or with a mechanical head equipped by a special tool for tractors. Stump harvesting is expected to provide an increasing component of the woody material required by the woody biomass power sector in Europe.
Resin extraction consists of incising the outer layers of a pine tree in order to collect the sap or resin.
Camphine was the British trade name of a 19th-century lamp fuel made from purified spirits of turpentine. Generally prepared by distilling turpentine with quicklime, it gave off a brilliant light. It was burned in chimney lamps that produced a strong draft to prevent smoking. Invented in 1838, it was a popular domestic lamp fuel until the 1860s. Camphine was alternatively spelled camphene, especially in the United States.
Abraham H. Galloway was an African American politician who served as a state Senator in North Carolina.
L.O. Crosby Sr. was an American businessman and timber industrialist in Mississippi. During his 50 years as an active industrialist, Crosby owned thousands of acres of southern pine timberlands and numerous sawmills for converting trees into lumber. He initiated construction of creosote treatment plants for preserving wood products, a tung-oil processing facility, and naval store facilities for extracting pine rosin from stumps that were removed from cutover forestlands.
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