Here at the Avon Park Air Force Range, more than 10,000 clay cups, dated from the 1920s, are the clearest remnants of an industry that has disappeared from South Florida and our own back yard.
Thousands of broken pieces of clay cover mounds that once were shaded by tall pine trees. While those native trees supply lumber, many don't know that their trunks were once stripped for turpentine.
Ronald L. Grayson, an archaeologist based at the Avon Park Air Force Range, has been studying the abandoned site, once the town of Nalaca.
Also spelled Nalaka, the town existed for only6 10 years as the now-defunct Consolidated Naval Stores dismantled it and moved. The company's operations shifted further south, and eventually it lost its turpentine market to petroleum substitutes, according to Grayson's research.
While the site was known sometime after the U.S. Air Force took over the range during the 1940s, little information was available on it until this point.
Nalaca And The Chippers
Founded in 1918 according to records Grayson held, the town had 250 people at its peak. At the Avon Park Depot Museum on Sunday, Grayson said that the town likely had a post office, a school and separate churches for black and white laborers.
Elaine Levey, the museum's director, said that turpentine collectors, or "chippers," worked the pines throughout Central Florida since the 1880s. Nalaca, therefore, came and went at the tail end of the era.
Nalaca didn't decline so much as it was simply dismantled and uprooted.
"If it was a tree worth getting turpentine out of, it usually good for lumber," Grayson explained. The turpentine operations usually came before the trees were cleared, and once the area cleared, the town was disassembled. By April 1929, it moved to Hicoria, south of Lake Placid.
The turpentine industry, however, was in a tailspin by this point. Turpentining from trees was always a labor-intensive job, and with labor costs increasing and petroleum-based substitutes become cheaper, the demand for wood-based turpentine plummeted.
Gene Brown, (read more here) who "turpentines," or "chips" trees to historically interpret the old trade, also blamed its decline on the demands for lumber, which directly conflicted with turpentine production.
Today, other than Brown, the trade's extinct.
Brown, from Sebring, took interest in how the turpentining tactics evolved, leading up to Nalaca's founding. At first, chippers bore cavities in the pine trees and stuck steel gutters into the trunk after peeling off the bark. The "cat face," as the gutter arrangement was called, would pour the raw turpentine into the cavity where they could collect it.
Then, the clay Herty cups replaced the cavity so that the process wouldn't kill the tree. But Consolidated chose to log the trees after turpentining them for their lumber.
 Turpentine Mural story |
 Herty Cup |
 |
 |
