The longleaf pine forest once stretched across some ninety million acres of the coastal South, from Virginia to Texas, an open, sunlit expanse of towering pines over a floor of wiregrass. It was built and maintained by fire, frequent gentle blazes sparked by summer lightning that cleared the brush and left the fire-adapted pines unharmed. Into that ancient forest came an industry that would bleed it tree by tree, and the men who did the bleeding were, for the most part, held in bondage. The product they extracted was called naval stores, and the name reveals its purpose.

A wooden ship leaks, and the only thing that stopped the sea from pouring through every seam was pitch and tar, sticky black distillations of pine resin. Pitch sealed hulls, tar soaked into rope and rigging to keep it from rotting in the salt air, and turpentine thinned paint and varnish and, blended with alcohol into a fuel called camphene, lit millions of American lamps before kerosene and electricity. Rosin went into soap, sealing wax, and a hundred other goods. A navy could not function without a steady supply, which is why governments treated it as a matter of national security.

North Carolina became so identified with the trade that its people earned the nickname Tar Heels. The work itself was strange, skilled, and brutal. In the older method, called boxing, a worker cut a deep cavity into the base of a living pine and then opened a fresh wound above it with a curved blade called a hack. The resin flowed down the face of the wound into the box.

But a wound heals, so every week or so the worker returned to cut a new streak just above the last, keeping the tree bleeding. Week after week the scarred face climbed up the trunk, until it reached seven feet and more. That tall weathered scar on the trunk was called a cat face, and it remains the signature of the entire industry. A worker called a chipper cut the streaks, and the dipper followed with a paddle and bucket, collecting the gum and hauling it to the still, where it was heated in a copper kettle until the volatile spirits of turpentine boiled off, condensed, and ran into barrels, while the molten rosin was drawn off below.

Around the still gathered the coopers who made the barrels, the teamsters who hauled them, and the woodsmen who tended the slow-smoldering tar kilns that cooked pitch directly from the resinous wood. It was hot, lonely, physically punishing work, done through the full brutality of the southern summer in woods full of snakes and biting insects, with no town or doctor nearby. And from the very beginning, it ran on forced labor. Before the Civil War, the boxing and chipping and dipping in the pine forests of the Carolinas and Georgia was done largely by enslaved people, a form of what historians call industrial slavery.

When the war ended slavery, the industry did not become a free and fair employer. It reached for new forms of coercion that reproduced the old control within the letter of the new law. One was debt peonage: a worker was advanced credit at the company store, paid not in real money but in company script that could only be spent at that same store at company-set prices, kept always a little in debt, forbidden to leave until the debt was cleared. A man could be bound to a camp for years, working to pay off a debt designed never to be paid off.

The other was convict leasing: southern states arrested black men in enormous numbers, often on trivial or invented charges, and leased them out to private companies, including the turpentine operators. The company paid the state. The convict was paid nothing and worked, often under the whip, in conditions that killed men regularly. The camps were isolated by design, set deep in the pinewoods miles from any town, containing the rough dwellings, the commissary, the still, and the whipping bosses who forced the required work out of men by violence.

There was no sheriff down the road, no court around the corner. A man could disappear, and no one on the outside would ask a single question. This is where Martin Tabert comes in. Tabert was a young man from North Dakota who, in 1922, was traveling through Florida when he was arrested for riding a train without paying the fare.

He was fined, and when he could not immediately pay, he was leased out to a turpentine camp to work off the fine. There he was flogged so brutally by a camp boss that he died of it. He was twenty-two years old. Because Tabert was white, and from a northern family who would not let the matter drop, and because the details of his death were so horrifying, his case became a national scandal.

An investigation followed, newspaper coverage spread across the country, and in 1923 the state of Florida abolished the leasing of convicts altogether. The system began to come apart. But the other half of that truth must be held beside it. The system that killed Tabert had been killing black men in exactly the same way, in exactly those camps, for decades.

Their deaths had not made the papers, had not sparked investigations, had not moved a legislature. It took the death of a young white man from the north to make the country look at what had been happening all along to men whose deaths it had been willing to ignore. There was one genuine reform to the craft itself. A chemist named Charles Herty, working in Georgia around the turn of the twentieth century, recognized that the old boxing method was ruinous.

Cutting a deep cavity into the trunk wounded the tree terribly and produced resin fouled with dirt. Around 1901, Herty introduced a better system, using a clay cup hung on the tree beneath metal gutters, so the resin dripped cleanly without carving a great cavity into the trunk. It was gentler on the tree and gave a cleaner product, and it was widely adopted. But it did not change the fundamental arrangement of the labor.

The cup still had to be hung, the streak still had to be chipped, the resin still had to be dipped by the same bound and leased and underpaid men. The scale of what those men produced by hand was staggering. In the 1920s, at the industry’s height, the United States was exporting something like eleven million gallons of spirits of turpentine in a single year. The port of Savannah became for a time the largest naval stores port in the entire world, its wharves stacked with barrels bound for the ships and factories of the globe.

The industry was restless, always moving south and west as it exhausted the longleaf in one district, chasing the receding forest from the Carolinas into Georgia, then deep into Florida, and along the Gulf into Alabama and Mississippi. And then it ended, from several directions at once. The longleaf forest, which had seemed endless, was not. Between the terpentining, the logging that followed, and the clearing of the land, the great forest was steadily destroyed, until only a few percent of it remains today.

At the same time, the world that needed naval stores was disappearing. Steel ships did not need pitch in their seams. Kerosene and then electricity replaced turpentine in the lamps. Wire rope replaced tarred hemp in the rigging.

Chemists learned to make turpentine from wood pulp and petroleum. Piece by piece, the modern world dismantled the reasons the industry had ever existed. The camps closed one by one, the stills went cold, and the men, freed at last from the camps but with the work that had defined their lives simply vanishing, scattered into an uncertain future. What is left is the scars and the silence and a very few surviving groves.

In the remnants of the old longleaf country, you can still find ancient pines carrying the healed cat face on their trunks, marking exactly where a chipper stood a century ago and swung his hack. Those scars are the only monuments most of these workers have. There are no statues to the dippers, almost no names. The industry kept careful count of its barrels and gallons and profits, and it did not keep the names of the men who filled those barrels.

The forest and the workers share a fate. Both were treated as endless and disposable. Both were nearly used up entirely, and both left behind only fragments and scars for us to read.

Behind every one of those weathered scars was a man with a name we no longer have and a life that was fully and only his own.