November 20, 2015 Coats Museum News
Bryan Avery and his hardworking team are doing an astounding job in revisiting the early history of our wonderful Harnett County. He has brought much attention to one of our state’s earliest industries-naval stores. This was the process of extracting turpentine from the long-leaf pines that grew from the Coastal Plains into the Piedmont section. Note names such as Pinehurst, Southern Pines, and Pine Level.
As early as 1861, the N.C. Business Directory (74-75) stated that cotton, corn and naval stores were staples of Harnett County. Small farmers and their sons likely tended the smaller tracts, while the large acreage was tended by hired white labor. Malcolm Flower wrote in his They Passed This Way in 1955 (123) that “the Negro race went into the Sandy Barren of the western Harnett and the eastern part of Harnett from Turlington’s Crossroads to Kit Barbee’s at Barclaysville. They rented crops of pine trees and tended them for turpentine like dirt farmers tended crops of cotton, corn and wheat.”
Prominent farmers in the Coats area, such as Daniel Stewart, who owned 1,200 acres, and his brother Eldridge Stewart, who owned 1,000 acres, lived the Black River and Bailey’s Crossroads area. Both were producers of naval stores. In Barclaysville, C.S. and C.C. Barbee owned 2,200 acres of long-leaf forest. They, too, were producers of naval stores as was A.D. Cutts who also owned a distillery (1872 N.C. Business Directory 117-118).
The industry was somewhat weaker in the late 1880’s but in 1883-84, Gazetteer (Harnett-p.383), it was reported that the county had only two coopers and five turpentine distilleries. None were in the Grove area. What is interesting is the large number of sawmills.
According to the 1872 Branson’s N.C. Business Directory (117), R. Matthews, T. Fowler, and Andrew Jackson Turlington owned sawmills. They continued to operate these mills in 1890 (1890 N.C. Business Directory (349-351).
Naval stores continued to exist in 1896 and in 1897 because spirits turpentine manufactured was in business in Turlington by Taylor and Slocumb and in Benson at A.T. Lee distilleries. Wm. Johnson, T. Fowler and A.J. Turlington operated mills in 1896 (1896 Branson’s Business Directory (329).
There is an interesting story shared in John Hairr’s Harnett County-A History (86). He wrote that in the winter of 1893, petitions were being circulated to remove the county seat from Lillington. The strongest contender was Turlington’s Crossroads. The firm of Taylor and Slocumb ran a mercantile operation at the intersection of the old Lillington Road and to the Dunn Road and the Stage Road. The men offered 5 acres of land for a jail and courthouse and $1,000 toward the construction of the county’s building with brick. The proponents were not able to muster enough support to make it happened.)
Considering there was limited means to transport the products of the woods, one must wonder how did the naval products get to a market. According to John A. Oates in The Story of Fayetteville (42), he quoted a Mr. Caleb C. Ballard who in 1859 said that naval stores were carried down to Wilmington on flatboats. Ballard remembered that there was no trouble in getting down the river except to keep the flatboat guided. There was no steam power then. It was a ten-day trip –four going and six coming returning (about 100 mile each way). If the trip was made to Fayetteville it was shorter.
Question—what is a flatboat? Malcolm Fowler wrote the history of Harnett County in 1955 and in his book (23) he wrote that once the trees were drained of their productivity, they were cut and assembled into rafts and floated down the Cape Fear to Wilmington. Five hundred dollars was the value of an average raft of logs. When steamers appeared on the Cape Fear, the rafters could ride back to Fayetteville rather than walk the distance.
Fowler also noted that the forests were handed the final blow when plank roads were being constructed to improve land travel (23). The sale of shingles (mainly cypress) and boards (mainly pine) helped to supplement the income of early farmers and brought huge profit to the sawmill operators who sold the lumber for construction of dwellings and barns even before the Revolutionary War (Lefler and Newsome- History of a Southern State, p.92).
Harnett folks, this is our heritage. The forest provided income for our ancestors. The scattering of white oak supplied staves for making tar and turpentine barrels. A fair sized kiln where lightwood was burned for tar would run 30 barrels of tar and sold for four or five dollars a barrel at Fayetteville (Daily Record October 18, 1955).
Ronald Avery dropped by the museum to share that he had a large portion of a scarred tree found on a family farm near Young Road that he wanted to give for display in our Naval Stores Exhibit. Thank you, Ronald and Frances for adding to our display. We are very proud to already have an 1857 bill of sales for naval products from the Alfred Bailey farm at Bailey’s Crossroads, naval stores tools, amber and several other items. We even have some tar recently made by Bryan Avery and his team.
What replaced those woods of long leaf pines? Did bulldozers root up those blackjacks and turn the land into tobacco fields or other crops? Are those fields now filled with houses an arm’s length apart?
I do know that the women at Pleasant Memory Baptist Church had baked pies and cakes for sale at Stephens Hardware Store in Coats The proceeds went to build classrooms for Sunday school at their church. Also, the following ASC Committee had been selected in Grove#1: Talmon D. Stewart (chairman), Earl Stewart, Nealie Matthews, Melvin Daniel, and Alton Avery; in Grove #2, Jarvis Pleasant (chairman), Walter Barnes, Mack R. Hudson, Rupert Parrish, and Howard Penny (Daily Record October 20, 1955).
Our Defenders of the Red, White and Blue event was a remarkable tribute to our veterans who have defended our beliefs in freedom from the cold battlefields in Korea, to the jungles of Vietnam, and on to the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. A big thank you goes to the veterans and family members who participated, American Legion Post 109 Honor Guard and Auxiliary, the Coats Area Chamber of Commerce, the Kiwani8s Club, the participants on the program, support from the town, the Triton FFA, those who stepped forward to help register and line up veterans, those who recorded the event and all the faithful museum board and volunteers who never let each other down--now on to interviewing and publishing the stories of the remarkable men and women in uniforms-our Defenders of the Red, White and Blue.
A special thank you goes to Patsy and Stacy Avery for remembering Mack Smith with a memorial to the museum and a thank you also goes to Wade Williams for his donation of a sausage stuffer to the museum. I bet there are lots of stories that can be told about it. Thanks, Wade, we can’t wait for visitors to share their memories of making sausage.
Bryan Avery and his hardworking team are doing an astounding job in revisiting the early history of our wonderful Harnett County. He has brought much attention to one of our state’s earliest industries-naval stores. This was the process of extracting turpentine from the long-leaf pines that grew from the Coastal Plains into the Piedmont section. Note names such as Pinehurst, Southern Pines, and Pine Level.
As early as 1861, the N.C. Business Directory (74-75) stated that cotton, corn and naval stores were staples of Harnett County. Small farmers and their sons likely tended the smaller tracts, while the large acreage was tended by hired white labor. Malcolm Flower wrote in his They Passed This Way in 1955 (123) that “the Negro race went into the Sandy Barren of the western Harnett and the eastern part of Harnett from Turlington’s Crossroads to Kit Barbee’s at Barclaysville. They rented crops of pine trees and tended them for turpentine like dirt farmers tended crops of cotton, corn and wheat.”
Prominent farmers in the Coats area, such as Daniel Stewart, who owned 1,200 acres, and his brother Eldridge Stewart, who owned 1,000 acres, lived the Black River and Bailey’s Crossroads area. Both were producers of naval stores. In Barclaysville, C.S. and C.C. Barbee owned 2,200 acres of long-leaf forest. They, too, were producers of naval stores as was A.D. Cutts who also owned a distillery (1872 N.C. Business Directory 117-118).
The industry was somewhat weaker in the late 1880’s but in 1883-84, Gazetteer (Harnett-p.383), it was reported that the county had only two coopers and five turpentine distilleries. None were in the Grove area. What is interesting is the large number of sawmills.
According to the 1872 Branson’s N.C. Business Directory (117), R. Matthews, T. Fowler, and Andrew Jackson Turlington owned sawmills. They continued to operate these mills in 1890 (1890 N.C. Business Directory (349-351).
Naval stores continued to exist in 1896 and in 1897 because spirits turpentine manufactured was in business in Turlington by Taylor and Slocumb and in Benson at A.T. Lee distilleries. Wm. Johnson, T. Fowler and A.J. Turlington operated mills in 1896 (1896 Branson’s Business Directory (329).
There is an interesting story shared in John Hairr’s Harnett County-A History (86). He wrote that in the winter of 1893, petitions were being circulated to remove the county seat from Lillington. The strongest contender was Turlington’s Crossroads. The firm of Taylor and Slocumb ran a mercantile operation at the intersection of the old Lillington Road and to the Dunn Road and the Stage Road. The men offered 5 acres of land for a jail and courthouse and $1,000 toward the construction of the county’s building with brick. The proponents were not able to muster enough support to make it happened.)
Considering there was limited means to transport the products of the woods, one must wonder how did the naval products get to a market. According to John A. Oates in The Story of Fayetteville (42), he quoted a Mr. Caleb C. Ballard who in 1859 said that naval stores were carried down to Wilmington on flatboats. Ballard remembered that there was no trouble in getting down the river except to keep the flatboat guided. There was no steam power then. It was a ten-day trip –four going and six coming returning (about 100 mile each way). If the trip was made to Fayetteville it was shorter.
Question—what is a flatboat? Malcolm Fowler wrote the history of Harnett County in 1955 and in his book (23) he wrote that once the trees were drained of their productivity, they were cut and assembled into rafts and floated down the Cape Fear to Wilmington. Five hundred dollars was the value of an average raft of logs. When steamers appeared on the Cape Fear, the rafters could ride back to Fayetteville rather than walk the distance.
Fowler also noted that the forests were handed the final blow when plank roads were being constructed to improve land travel (23). The sale of shingles (mainly cypress) and boards (mainly pine) helped to supplement the income of early farmers and brought huge profit to the sawmill operators who sold the lumber for construction of dwellings and barns even before the Revolutionary War (Lefler and Newsome- History of a Southern State, p.92).
Harnett folks, this is our heritage. The forest provided income for our ancestors. The scattering of white oak supplied staves for making tar and turpentine barrels. A fair sized kiln where lightwood was burned for tar would run 30 barrels of tar and sold for four or five dollars a barrel at Fayetteville (Daily Record October 18, 1955).
Ronald Avery dropped by the museum to share that he had a large portion of a scarred tree found on a family farm near Young Road that he wanted to give for display in our Naval Stores Exhibit. Thank you, Ronald and Frances for adding to our display. We are very proud to already have an 1857 bill of sales for naval products from the Alfred Bailey farm at Bailey’s Crossroads, naval stores tools, amber and several other items. We even have some tar recently made by Bryan Avery and his team.
What replaced those woods of long leaf pines? Did bulldozers root up those blackjacks and turn the land into tobacco fields or other crops? Are those fields now filled with houses an arm’s length apart?
I do know that the women at Pleasant Memory Baptist Church had baked pies and cakes for sale at Stephens Hardware Store in Coats The proceeds went to build classrooms for Sunday school at their church. Also, the following ASC Committee had been selected in Grove#1: Talmon D. Stewart (chairman), Earl Stewart, Nealie Matthews, Melvin Daniel, and Alton Avery; in Grove #2, Jarvis Pleasant (chairman), Walter Barnes, Mack R. Hudson, Rupert Parrish, and Howard Penny (Daily Record October 20, 1955).
Our Defenders of the Red, White and Blue event was a remarkable tribute to our veterans who have defended our beliefs in freedom from the cold battlefields in Korea, to the jungles of Vietnam, and on to the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. A big thank you goes to the veterans and family members who participated, American Legion Post 109 Honor Guard and Auxiliary, the Coats Area Chamber of Commerce, the Kiwani8s Club, the participants on the program, support from the town, the Triton FFA, those who stepped forward to help register and line up veterans, those who recorded the event and all the faithful museum board and volunteers who never let each other down--now on to interviewing and publishing the stories of the remarkable men and women in uniforms-our Defenders of the Red, White and Blue.
A special thank you goes to Patsy and Stacy Avery for remembering Mack Smith with a memorial to the museum and a thank you also goes to Wade Williams for his donation of a sausage stuffer to the museum. I bet there are lots of stories that can be told about it. Thanks, Wade, we can’t wait for visitors to share their memories of making sausage.