APPENDIX – A HISTORY OF THE LONGLEAF PINE

 

The original settlers, interested primarily in agriculture, largely bypassed the Sandhills region and its immense stands of longleaf pine. But slowly, people with other motives came looking for profits, and found the seemingly limitless treasure trove of the longleaf pine forests.

 

In the nineteenth century, naval stores -- tar, pitch, turpentine, and rosin -- were highly sought after. Naval stores refer to tree by-products used extensively in early ship building. For hundreds of years, boat builders used pine pitch to waterproof the seams between the planks of their wooden ships. Sailors coated the rigging of sails with tar to protect the ropes from the corrosive salt air.

 

They also used the tar to patch leaks. Hundreds of ships from all over the world anchored in the ports of Wilmington and Charleston to load barrels of naval stores “mined” in the deep longleaf pine forests of the Sandhills.

 

Turpentine and rosin were produced from the gummy resin contained in the living trees. The longleaf pines were opened by hacking into the trunks low on the tree so the sap could be collected -- not unlike the process of collecting maple sugar sap in the production of syrups. The gum was collected every few weeks and taken to a distillery, whereby heating it was separated into a clear liquid called turpentine and a darker solid called rosin.

 

Unfortunately, the destructive methods of the tupentiners killed many trees and left others vulnerable to storms and fires. By the 1880s and 1890s, longleaf pine was among the most sought after timber trees in the country. Its slow growth created wood of great strength. Longleaf lumber was shipped all over the world as giant squared timbers for use in building bridges, factories, and wharves. Thousands of heartwood crossties were made from longleaf pine and used by railroads throughout the country.

 

As they stripped the woods of their trees, loggers left mounds of flammable debris that frequently fueled catastrophic fires, destroying both the remaining trees and seedlings. The exposed earth left behind by clear cutting operations was highly susceptible to erosion, and nutrients were washed from the already porous soils. This further destroyed the natural seeding process.

 

At the peak of the timber cutting in the 1890s and the first decade of the new century, the longleaf pine forests of the Sandhills were providing millions of board feet of timber each year. The timber cutters gradually moved across the South; by the 1920s, most of the “limitless” virgin longleaf pine forests were gone.

 

In an attempt to protect the remaining longleaf pine forests and encourage regeneration, turn-of-the-century foresters made a classic mistake: they condemned the frequent fires used by the Native Americans, cattlemen, and turperntiners, and turned instead to a policy of fire suppression. This policy caused natural fuels (needles, limbs, cones, and scrub-oak leaves and twigs) to accumulate rapidly in the remaining forests, creating even worse fire hazards. Without fire, the diverse ground cover was slowly smothered beneath the dense carpet of pine needles and oak leaves. Longleaf pine seeds could no longer germinate because they could not reach the mineral soil. Scrub oak, normally shrub-sized in the natural longleaf forests swept by frequent fires, grew into dense, tall thickets, further preventing light to the forest floor and competing with the longleaf seedlings for soil nutrients and moisture.

 

The wildlife accustomed to the open longleaf pine/wiregrass ecosystem -- wild turkeys, fox squirrels, bob-white quail, and red-cockaded woodpeckers -- virtually disappeared, replaced by the inhabitants of denser pine forests. The intricate interplay of life adapted to longleaf pine ecosystem was slowly dying.

 

Today, longleaf pine is an ecosystem in trouble everywhere in the South. Of the estimated 90 million acres in the pre-settlement forests, only about 2 million acres of mostly second-growth longleaf pine remain in scattered patches. Less than half of that is found on public lands. Those stands of longleaf in private ownership continue to decline, as landowners replace the longleaf with faster growing species such as loblolly pine. And, despite our increasing knowledge about the beneficial role of fire, especially fire during the growing season, many landowners still do not burn their longleaf pine forests, or do not burn them often enough.