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Enslaved workers at the Grist property

6/1/2024

North Carolina turpentine distillery. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.

Slave schedules for the 1860 U.S. Federal Census reveal Dr. John D. Bellamy enslaved 24 teenagers and men on his turpentine operation at "Grist", a small settlement in Columbus County, NC, 60 miles west of Wilmington near the town of Chadbourn. Ranging in age from 17 to 40 and collectively living in nine "cabins," these enslaved workers, together with 82 at his "Grovely" plantation in Brunswick County and nine more at his residence in Wilmington, totaled 115 men, women and children. This meant Bellamy was one North Carolina's largest slaveholders in 1860.

Although Bellamy identified himself as a physician to a census taker in 1850, he listed himself as a merchant in 1860. In 1854, John paid $4,500 for the large tract of pine forest, convenient to railroad lines, at Grist. While the word grist refers to grain for milling into products like flour it was not grain but this turpentine distillery, using the labor of the enslaved workers, that proved lucrative.

Much of the work involved cutting boxes, or holes approximately six to eight inches, to collect resin in barrels placed at the base of trees.

North Carolinians are nicknamed Tar Heels, originally as a pejorative for perceivedly lowly work with pine resin (the 'tar'). During the Civil War, however, soldiers took up the name and post-war it became a symbol of state pride [1]. For many people the manufacture of pitch, tar, rosin, and turpentine was critical for a variety of uses and for the revenue produced. Turpentine, for example, was put into everything from makeup to medicine in the mid-19th century.

A lonely, dirty, dangerous business:
Extracting this 'pine tar' is described by historian David Cecelski; "A 'boxed tree' was one that had a section of its bark cut away so that the resin flowed into the hollow in the tree where it could be collected. To make 'spirits of turpentine,' the woodsmen and women (often enslaved laborers) collected and distilled that resin, not terribly unlike making liquor." [2] Given that pine resin featured in so many products, plus preserved wood and waterproofed ships, it was unsurprising that North Carolina, one of the world's leading sources, accumulated so much wealth from its pine trees.

As lucrative as it was for the White land owners, the industry could be solitary and physically taxing for the enslaved workers. The industry used the task system. An overseer assigned enslaved workers a task, or multiple tasks, and they were responsible for completing them. This meant an enslaved naval stores worker could continue with limited or no supervision for several days at a stretch.

Shoes, hats and blankets were often the only items enslaved workers on these turpentine farms had that were not made on site. Different from plantation life, where families were often housed together, laboring in a turpentine operation could be more solitary with perhaps only a small number of female enslaved cooks with the male laborers. Working conditions were harsh. Summer heat, mosquitoes, poisonous snakes and poison ivy, among much else, were prevalent and led to a variety of maladies. Wet ground and forests made it difficult if not impossible to move carts led by mules.

Enslaved men working the pine forests were often subjected to cruel punishment at the hands of overseers and agents who managed the operations for men who lived in other counties. Runaways were not uncommon. Housing was another difficulty. Workers in the naval stores industry primarily lived in crude lean‐tos, sometimes no more than four feet high. More than a few suffered illnesses caused by breathing the fumes of the portable copper turpentine stills. [3] There were several methods for distilling, including tar kilns and pits, and using fallen and burnt logs as well as boxed trees. If not by rail or wagon, the North Carolina river system brought the products to the coast for use or sale. [4]

Collecting pitch from pine trees in North Carolina. Image courtesy of UNC Chapel Hill.

When enslaved people would stir pine tar, pitch and turpentine, it was often in huge cauldrons that required them to stand on the edge and use a long stirrer, almost like an oar. One slip could lead to severe burning. In this case, being a “Tar Heel” was certainly not a good thing. In 1850 there were 1,144 distillers of pine tar products in the state, and most had businesses in Wilmington. By 1860 the value of this trade was over $5 million. [5] To that point, an unproven story, likely an apocryphal boast but certainly indicative, relayed by John Bellamy Jr. in his manuscript, Memoirs of an Octogenarian (readable here), was that one year's profit from one of his father's plantations paid for the Bellamy house in Wilmington. As with cotton and rice plantations on the Cape Fear the hard work of enslaved Black workers was central to this egregiously unequal economy and society.

This piece of 'chevroned' longleaf pine can be viewed at the Bellamy Museum. It was presented to the museum by Old Growth Riverwood, a company that salvages wooden buildings and, as in this case, recovers old growth woods from the Cape Fear River.

Clearly seen are the many marks of years of cutting this tree to drain the resin. Longleaf pines uptake water through their dense, damp interior rather than their bark, so 'boxing' a tree can take place over many years. These trees can live to 300 years old and their range was once 92 million acres from coastal North Carolina to Texas. Now less than 5% of that ecosystem remains. [6]

[1] William S. Powell (March 1982). "What's in a Name? Why We're All Called Tar Heels". Tar Heel magazine
[2] David Cecelski (reviewing 1809 diary excerpts from English traveler Holles Bull Way), Coastal Review article, July 2018, coastalreview.org.https://coastalreview.org/2018/07/pitch-pines-and-tar-burners-a-1792-account/
[3] Dr. Lloyd Johnson. https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/naval-stores/
[4] David Cecelski (reviewing 1809 diary excerpts from English traveler Holles Bull Way), Coastal Review article, July 2018, coastalreview.org.https://coastalreview.org/2018/07/pitch-pines-and-tar-burners-a-1792-account/
[5] Dr. Lloyd Johnson. https://northcarolinahistory.org/encyclopedia/naval-stores/
[6] Article, WUFT Public Media, Veronica Nocera. May 9, 2024. www.tuft.org/environment/2024-05-09/the-trees-truth-once-dominant-longleaf-pines-face-the-growing-threat-of-climate-change

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Don Floyd: Our 45-Year "White House" Fixer

6/1/2024

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1980s Don Floyd in the early days of the site's restoration. Here he's creating molds for recreating the decorative plaster. The blackened plaster was fire damaged in 1972 and was used to make the mold and create replacement pieces for sections too badly damaged to reuse.

Best described as a “multitalented craftsman,” Don has been involved in restoration projects at the Bellamy Mansion Museum for nearly a half century, including everything from the etched glass around the front door to huge mirror frames, parlor gasoliers, crown moldings, brass window valances, and even skeleton keys.

Don now works closely with museum site manager Bob Lock, who rediscovered a newspaper article written about Don 45 years ago! Writing in the 1980s, Helen Sharpe, a journalist for The Robesonian newspaper, was reminiscing about her fondness for the Floyd Hardware store on West 2nd Street in Lumberton, NC. Her focus quickly turned to Don. She wrote, “I couldn’t believe he knew so much about light fixtures, especially old ones. He did a lot of reading about them, knew how they were put together and how they should be maintained. When lovely old homes of the community would be taken down, he would be on hand to salvage an especially lovely fixture.”

The unrestored mansion as it looked when Don spotted it during a trip to Wilmington.

Don’s fascination with the Bellamy Mansion began in 1968, Sharpe observed, when he traveled to Wilmington for the Azalea Festival air show. As he rode past the mansion it captured his imagination. At that time there was a store, Divine Antiques, run by Virginia Jennewein, in the basement. The rest of the home was unoccupied. He stopped to look in but was refused permission to see the rest of the interior. In response, he made the rash statement that he would etch and donate the glass for the front door should it be restored. The woman in the antique store replied, “Anybody that damned crazy can go in.”

A few years after that, Sharpe remembers visiting Floyd Hardware and found Don in a state of alarm. "He was grieving that the Bellamy mansion in Wilmington had been the victim of arsonists. The fire in the mansion which occurred during the early ‘70s came at a time of racial troubles, and Don deeply feels the irony of this because the house is an example of the genius of Black artistic craftsmanship, one of the finest Greek revival buildings in the entire South.”

After the devastating 1972 fire at the mansion, Don was instrumental in the painstaking repairs to fixtures and other house features.

Among his projects back then was to repair the etched glass above the front door. Don recalls that he recreated the design in the lunette (or half-moon) window from his imagination. A few years later, he saw a picture of the original entrance and his design was virtually identical! Nearly five decades later, in 2019, Don revisited his previous work to re-etch some pieces of glass in the lunette and in the sidelight windows that had cracked over time.

More recently, Don took on the task of reproducing skeleton keys for the four adult bedroom level closets. The term ‘skeleton key’ refers to any key that can open multiple locks. Incidentally, closets were present in Europe from the 1500s but were usually whole rooms. America refined the idea into reach-in closets within walls in the mid 1800s. Early clothes closets employed pegs, although Thomas Jefferson reputedly had a hanger device in Monticello. One fine story of invention is that in 1903, Albert J. Parkhouse of the Timberlake Wire and Novelty Company in Jackson Mississippi, couldn't find a spot to hang his coat and upgraded the clothes peg idea by twisting wire into the shape we recognize as the modern hanger. Whatever the truth of these details, the Bellamy's locking closets, like the gasoliers and fixtures Don also fixed, were part of the ever-evolving world of domestic living.

Perhaps Don's longest project, and one has which led him to introspection on the history embodied by the site, was the restoration of the parlor mirror frames. They had been blackened and damaged in the 1972 fire. Also, water from the firehoses, having hit the hot mirror glass, had caused it to crack.

Back in 1860, John D. and Eliza Bellamy took a trip to New York and bought furnishings and fixtures for their new house. These included the gasoliers by Philadelphia company Cornelius and Baker, the piano by the Knabe company of Baltimore, and the large mirrors.

The original mirror frames were finished with gold leaf. During the 1970s and 80s, while restoring the frames in his home workshop, the gilt would catch Don's eye and take his thoughts back to those original glory days of the house. He added that thinking of that Civil War era also called to mind the quote from Winston Churchill that, “History is written by the victors.” While considering the thousands of lives that were lost on both sides, Don laments there are no victors in war. In his view, both Confederates and Yankees came away physically and mentally crippled. Taking on an historic preservation project, which takes much time and attention to detail, often leads to reflection on the lives of those who came before.

Another tricky project was the restoration of the molding above the gasoliers. The parlor gasoliers were lit with coal gas, a by-product of naval stores processing. The medallions above the gasoliers were decorative, but served a practical purpose in hiding soot from the coal gas. The original medallions above the front parlor gasolier were, Don notes, "shaken loose by a group of kids on a tour in the house jumping up and down on the floor of the room above.” They had to be cleaned up and, in some cases, recast in plaster.

Don shared some memories about restoring these and the similarly involved crown molding in the foyer. Doing the work at home, it attracted the attention of some neighborhood kids who asked if they could help. He let them pour some of the molding material and before it dried, he invited the kids to put their names on the backs of the molds. That idea came from the discovery, during Preservation NC's 1990s restoration, of the 'WBG' initials on the back of an original piece of plaster in the house. The story of it's discovery and the man who inscribed it is a mainstay of museum tours today. WBG was William Benjamin Gould, an enslaved plasterer who worked on many antebellum homes in the Wilmington area, including Bellamy's, and made a daring escape downriver in 1862. Letting the kids etch their names was a nod to this fascinating history and Gould, the skilled enslaved craftsman who had originally created this beautiful plasterwork in 1860.

Unlike many enslaved people, Gould was educated and literate. He was also a highly skilled plasterer. Consequently Gould's owner, planter Nicholas Nixon, hired him out and profited from those skills.

Speaking of the crown molding, Don says the design in the formal parlors is a dogwood pattern. The space behind is hollow. It would have been too heavy if that molding had been solid. He says the original had “shivers” (a.k.a. slivers) of heart pine mixed into plaster to make it stronger. Chuckling about his version of fortifying the new moldings he adds, "I used toothpicks.”

Check out some pictures of the mansion and slave quarters restoration. Our website features a before and after gallery here. There you can appreciate Don's decades of work, as well as that of many other preservation experts.

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Enslaved workers at the Grist property

Don Floyd: Our 45-Year "White House" Fixer

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