What do Georgia pine trees, concrete, turpentine, and beauty queens have in common?
All of these things have something to do with naval stores products! Yes, even the beauty queens! What are naval stores, you ask? They are all the different kinds of products that come from pine resin.
Georgia is a huge producer of pine trees as crops, a practice that took hold to combat soil depletion and erosion, and as a good way to make money on crops. LONNIE’S NEW CROP is a film about just that endeavor, which you can watch here: https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/pawtucket2/index.php/Detail/objects/17131 It’s part of the Hargrett Rare Book & Manuscript Library’s Southern Forest Institute Collection.
The UGA Extension Service filmmaker for many years was J. Aubrey Smith, known to his colleagues as Smitty. He filmed a lot of pine-tree related films, 4-H events, farm families, agricultural stories, pine stories, chemical stories, etc., all in service of promoting Georgia’s agricultural variety and importance. Here he is in his prime:
When our blogging and tweeting friends at the Hagley Museum and Library recently announced the digitization of a great collection of educational/instructional/industrial films by Cinecraft, we were excited to learn about those films and retweeted a Tweet about the collection. A volunteer at Hagley working on the Cinecraft film collection got in touch with us to let us know about some Georgia-related raw film footage in the Cinecraft collection, footage about Vinsol, a naval stores product used in roadway concrete, and manufactured in Brunswick, Georgia. Another film of theirs includes a film-within-a-film telling how turpentine is made, and includes more footage from Georgia: https://digital.hagley.org/FILM_2018201_FC21
Well, that made us want to show off some of our turpentine/pine tree/naval stores footage. Here’s Smitty’s film about the making of pine products, SUWANEE PINE, https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/pawtucket2/index.php/Detail/objects/22832
Here’s a link to UGA Special Collections’ Russell Library for Political Research and Study’s page about the film. Note that Smitty’s film repeats a story that rosin grades were named for enslaved African Americans’ skin tones. That page provides a link to a document that states that story isn’t true. What is true is how hard African Americans have worked in this industry over the past couple of centuries, which you can see in many of these films.
Pine tapping footage from the late 1920s also shows up in our Ehrlich home movie collection from Brunswick, Georgia, at the 10:31 mark in this link: https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/pawtucket2/index.php/Detail/objects/17073
An offshoot of all this pine industry cash windfall are annual celebrations in Georgia communities where pine products are important, and where there’s a crop celebration, there are Queens, Kings, and Princesses, to be sure! Two 1951 film outtakes from Smitty’s collections came to us a few years back from UGA’s Extension Services offices.
One of them depicts celebrations around the Sixth Annual Pine Tree Festival in Swainsboro, Georgia--watch the gorgeous Kodachrome footage here: https://bmac.libs.uga.edu/pawtucket2/index.php/Detail/objects/329070. Note the shots of the Pine Tree Queen, Miss Fayette Bell (above), at 1:49, 3:24, and 3:52. Details about the festival appear in Georgia Forestry magazine, May 1951, available on the Internet Archive.
Then there’s footage of the Miss Gum Spirits of Turpentine competition for 1951, at which Miss Nora Jean Wimberly of Quincy, Florida, was crowned Queen.
This took place during celebrations around the 15th annual meeting of the American Turpentine Farmer’s Association in Valdosta, Georgia, home of the association and “naval stores center of the world.” So says the article in that same issue of Georgia Forestry. We love it when we can match up footage to documents!
You never knew that there were so many aspects to a pine tree, did you? Thanks to our friends @hagleyvault and the Hagley Museum and Library for the inspiration!
