Southern States -- Social conditions; United States -- Race relations
Growing trees are available not only for lumber and railroad ties, but for
turpentine, and any two of these processes, or even all three, may be
going on at the same time. On a tract of pine land, no matter where,
usually the first process is to box the trees for turpentine, and the men
in the business sometimes buy the land outright, but oftener simply pay a
royalty. For this privilege the old-fashioned price was a cent a tree,
which would be about $40 or $50 for a 160-acre tract; but lately farmers
have received as much as a thousand dollars for the turpentine on their
farms. The box or cut in the trunk can be enlarged upward every year for
five years; then if the tree is left untouched for six or seven years it
may be back-boxed on the other side and will yield again for five or six
years; so that it takes about twenty years to exhaust the turpentine from
a given area. The flow from the incision, collected in a hollow cut out of
the wood, or by a better modern method of spigots and cups, not unlike
that used for maple trees, is periodically collected and carried to the
still, where the turpentine is distilled over, and the heavier residue
makes the commercial resin. At the prices of the last few years this
"naval stores" industry has been profitable and millions of trees are
still being tapped.
In mining, the South has no such position as in timber. The coal product
is respectable and growing--in 1906 nearly 40 million tons, which was a
ninth of the national product. Iron ore is also plentiful; and lead and
zinc are abundant in Missouri. Of the output of more than a hundred
millions of precious metals, not half a million can be traced to the
South--and there are no valuable copper mines.
"Varsification, that's what we want," was the dictum of the sage of a
country store in the South; and diversification the South has certainly
attained. The annual money value of manufactured products has now become
considerably greater than of the agricultural products, though of course
the crops are the raw materials to many manufactures. In 1880 the
manufactured products of the South were under 500 million dollars, or one
eleventh of the total of the United States; in 1900 they had risen to
1,500 millions, or about one ninth of the total; and in 1905 they were
2,200 millions--a seventh of the total.
The most striking advance in manufactures has been in iron, the production
of pig rising from 1,600,000 tons in 1888 to 3,100,000 in 1906, a seventh
of the national total; a prosperity due in part to the close proximity of
excellent ore and coal. But the production in other parts of the Union has
increased even more rapidly, so that the proportion of iron made in the
South is smaller than at any time in twenty years. One difficulty of the
manufacture is that it requires besides the crude labor of the Negroes a
large amount of skilled labor, which cannot be furnished by the Poor
Whites or the Mountain Whites.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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