Chesnutt and the Turpentine Pine

Finally, Mary Kuhn’s paper focuses on how Charles Chesnutt uses the long-leaf pine forest to link white anxieties about deforestation and scarcity to a long history of exploitation. In the late nineteenth century, when... [ view full abstract ]

Finally, Mary Kuhn’s paper focuses on how Charles Chesnutt uses the long-leaf pine forest to link white anxieties about deforestation and scarcity to a long history of exploitation. In the late nineteenth century, when Chesnutt began publishing fiction, the turpentine industry of North Carolina had started to collapse. Turpentine, made from the sap of long-leaf pine trees, had driven North Carolina’s economy for several centuries, making it a source of crucial naval stores for first British and later American ships. By the 1850s, Frederick Law Olmstead assessed that the state’s planters profited more from enslaved men working in turpentine “orchards” than in cotton fields. Yet Northern whites largely thought of antebellum Southern forests as untouched natural environments and contrasted them with the cultivated spaces of the plantation. After the Civil War, in fact, the North Carolina pine woods gained a reputation in the medical community as a salubrious natural climate for delicate Northern constitutions, even as they remained sites of coerced labor. As deforestation threatened to destroy these climates, Chesnutt connects the threat of deforestation to a long history of exploitation.