There will be about that number of trees on an area of two hundred acres.
Most of the turpentine farms are worked by operators on a large scale. Small landowners can not afford to work their trees, and so they rent or lease their forests for four years at the rate of fifty dollars per crop of ten thousand boxes. The total expense of working one crop is about six hundred dollars per year, or twenty-four hundred dollars for four years. Few operators work less than ten crops, which would make their expenditures twenty-four thousand dollars during the four years. To this should be added the cost of a plant (about four thousand dollars) for working ten or twenty crops, establishing a still, building houses and sheds, and buying tools, mules, and horses.
The amount of product gathered from a crop of two hundred acres in the first year is about two hundred and eighty barrels of dip and seventy barrels of scrape. This yields at the still about two thousand gallons of spirits of turpentine and two hundred and sixty barrels of rosin. In the fourth and last year the yield of the crop falls to about one thousand gallons of spirits and one hundred and ten barrels of rosin.
In speaking of the profits of the turpentine industry a veteran operator said: "There is no money in the business nowadays. Prices are too low. With the spirits at twenty-seven cents per gallon and resin at a dollar and twenty cents, it takes a right smart man to make much more than one dollar per acre."
The prices of all kinds of naval stores reached their highest point during the late war, when spirits of turpentine sold for a dollar and fifty cents and a dollar and seventy-five cents per gallon, and inferior grades of rosin sold for four dollars a barrel. This gave a "boom" to the turpentine industry of France, as production in the South was practically checked for several years.
Next to the work in the pine forest, the operations at the still are interesting. Here, by the process of distillation, are obtained the different resinous products of trade, which go under the name of "naval stores." The term seems to be a misnomer just now when ships are built of iron and steel. About nine tenths of all the naval stores are used in industries other than shipbuilding.[1]
If you go into a turpentine still when it is in operation you will see how much care is taken to obtain the naval stores. You will inhale the health-giving properties of the pine-tree sap. Your nostrils are tickled by the pungent odor of the boiling turpentine; there is something strong and stimulating about the smell. Your lungs seem to swell to twice their normal size, and, as one person
- ↑ Oddly enough, the term "naval stores" is not defined in Webster, Worcester, or the Century dictionaries.
