When British invaders established what is now Jamestown in 1607, they entered the northeastern edge of that once extensive longleaf pine forest, finding it so airy and open that “a man may gallop a horse amongst these woods any waie,” Captain John Smith claimed. The forest was “a plain wilderness,” he wrote, “as God first made it.” The colonists looked for proof of that idea—that this “forest primeval” had been shaped by God’s own hand for the use of European men—in the nature of the forest itself: it seemed designed and intentional, “not choked up with an undergrowth of brambles and bushes, but as if laid out by hand in a manner so open, that you might freely drive a four horse chariot in the midst of the trees,” the Jesuit missionary Andrew White wrote of the forest around the Potomac in 1633.
Forestry books on longleaf are filled with quotations like these, many of which are fond of acknowledging that in 1608 the first export from the Jamestown Colony back to England consisted of wooden poles, wooden shakes (a kind of rough-split wooden shingle), pitch, and tar—all products of longleaf pine. Longleaf became one of the colony’s chief sources of revenue, an increasingly important commodity for the naval-based economy of the British Empire: The wood was straight and hard and resistant to decay; it made good planks in ships and good timber for the construction of fences and homes. When wounded, it secreted oleoresin, a resinous, acidic oil that could be refined into pine tar, rosin, turpentine, and pine oil—collectively referred to as “naval stores,” products used to seal the seams between wooden planks on ships in the growing colonial fleet.
Back in London, longleaf became the building material of choice. Construction plans proudly specified longleaf “pitch pine” (as it was known in England) for the studs, frames, and beams, and also for the floors, doors, wall panels, cabinets, and many different varieties of furniture. At Balmoral, the royal castle of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria in Scotland, the floors and walls were made with longleaf pine.
According to Welsh historical geographer Michael Williams, it is almost impossible to understate the role wood played in the colonial economy; “From the early seventeenth century to the early twentieth century the trees of the forests produced the most valuable raw material in American life and livelihood,” he writes. In every census year but one between 1850 and 1910, the manufacturing value of the lumber industry exceeded cotton. And, like the cotton industry, the lumber industry relied on the unpaid forced labor of enslaved Africans, who created the wood products that played a role in every part of life in America as well as across the colonial empires of Europe. For this reason, he argues, to the census value of lumber manufacturing should be added the products of “the wood planers, the packing-box manufacturers, the coopers, the tanners, the carriage makers, and the furniture makers,” as well as “the shipbuilders and house builders,” and the entire transportation industry, “being essential in the majority of ships, riverboats and barges, carriages and railcars, bridges and railroad ties, in plank and corduroy roads, and even in road surface blocks and canal locks. It was the major material used in household, industrial, and agricultural implements and machines.”