Naval Stores

Last week Newport Industries, Inc., one of the two principal U. S. companies producing naval stores, reported earnings of $295,117 for 1935, as against $161,619 the year before. This indicated no 1935 boom in the sales of ships' logs, rigging or hardtack but the gradual upswing of a modern and highly unmaritime industry. Newport industries, like its only big competitor, Hercules Powder Co., sells products distilled from the pitchy roots of Southern pines. Like Hercules, it has striven throughout Depression to diversify these products and find new uses for them. But while Hercules' $3,175,000 profit last year was derived from four other large manufacturing interests (explosives, nitrocellulose, chemical cotton, chemicals for the paper trade), Newport's came entirely from naval stores and their byproducts.

Naval stores originally got their name because as long as ships were wooden, pine tar and pitch were chiefly used in calking hulls and in tarring rope. The first Englishmen who went to North Carolina in the 16th Century saw in the Southern pine forests supplies of pitch and lumber which would make English shipbuilders independent of Scandinavia for these necessities. The same timberlands 300 years later were yielding two-thirds of the world's turpentine and rosin, the simplest derivatives of pitch. By 1900 there were 1,500 distilling centres in the South with an annual production of 600,000 barrels of turpentine, 2,000,000 barrels of rosin.

Up to that time Southerners used only one method of getting pitch out of a pine tree: Slash the trunk about waisthigh, let it drip into buckets. Some 12,000 farmers are still collecting pitch by gashing their pines with "catfaces" and having it distilled into 80% of the naval stores produced in the U. S.* In the early 1900's, when Southern lumbering was at its peak, a new steam process for extracting turpentine directly from, sawmill waste was introduced, and a new byproduct, pine oil, not present in the gum of the living tree, was found. It is this process which Newport and the naval stores division of Hercules Powder have used to-- build up the other 20% of the total business, sharing it fairly evenly between them.

They get their rosin, turpentine and pine oil not from sawdust but from the dead stumps in cut-over Southern timber land--the deader the better. The stumps are either pulled by large wallowing machines or dynamited, depending on the soil and the quality of the stumps. Hercules, which makes dynamite, generally pulls its stumps. Newport, which makes no dynamite, generally blasts them. The stumps are then shredded and steamed. Turpentine and some pine oil are the first distillates, and the residue is treated under pressure with gasoline to extract the rosin and pine oil.

For years both companies had tough sledding in getting their products sold because their turpentine had a queer smell and the rosin was too dark. Newport now manufactures acceptable turpentine and rosin in grades ranging from the worst and darkest Grade B ("Benny" to Newport men, "Betsy" to Hercules) to the finest transparent shade used in varnish. The Hercules line starts with the fourth category, Grade F ("Frank"). About half the annual U. S. production of naval stores (30,000,000 gal. of turpentine, 600,000 tons of rosin) is exported. Most of the turpentine sold in the U. S. goes to master painters, while paper and soap manufacturers take a large proportion of the rosin.

For pine oil there used to be only one big use, the treatment of copper ore. Constantly tinkering this product, the naval stores companies now have outlets in disinfectants, textile compounds, solvents, lotions, polishes, liquid soaps, insecticides. Newport has just completed a new plant to produce camphor and two other new byproducts: anethol, a substitute for oil of anise; and fenchone, a liquid with camphor properties. Newport's neatest economy was the creation, with Armstrong Corp., of Armstrong-Newport Co., which uses what is left of the pine stumps to make wall board.

Such industrial ingenuity is deep-rooted in the Newport tradition. The company was founded by Milwaukee's famed Schlesinger family, whose flair for industrial out-riding led them from a string of iron mines in the Lake Superior district to Milwaukee Coke & Gas Co., then to Newport Chemical Co., which made dyes and other by-products of coal tar, and finally, in 1913, to the new fields offered by the South's cut-over forests. The first Newport plant was at Bay Minette, Ala. In 1916 another was built at Pensacola, Fla. Ferdinand Schlesinger, who quit teaching school in Kilbourn, Wis. to go into iron mining in the 19th Century, died in 1921. When the Newport Chemical & Dye division was sold to the du Ponts in 1931, Ferdinand's son, Armin Ardery Schlesinger, kept the naval stores division, is still Newport's president.

* Farmers ship to factors in the two great U. S. naval stores markets, Savannah, Ga. and Jacksonville, Fla., selling their products in "units" (one 50-gal. barrel of turpentine, three and one-third 500-lb. barrels of rosin). A unit is now worth around $43, compared to $33 in 1932. However, Savannah and Jacksonville markets quote turpentine in gallons (last week: 38-c- per gal.) and Rosin in 280-lb. barrels (last week: from $3.10 per bbl. for grade B to $5.40 for WW and X, highest grades).

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