The Elusive Roots of Rosin Potatoes

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The Copelands’ experience working family land and trees represents the zenith of the industry for Black workers, who sold gum to central distilleries as supplemental income. But before Civil Rights legislation passed in the 1960s, the Jim Crow South held a significant number of Black turpentine workers in bondage through debt peonage, most often by forcing them to buy marked-up goods at camp commissaries. Though the practice was illegal at the federal level, Southern states enacted laws that forbade workers from leaving jobs while indebted to their bosses.

The industry also leased convicts — a majority being Black men — from the state. Though it had been outlawed elsewhere, Georgia and Florida practiced convict leasing until 1908 and 1923, respectively. 

Though Prizer found relationships between some owners and Black workers were warm, respectful, and often nuanced, anyone poking through turpentine’s past will find, in abundance, brutality, kidnapping, coercion, paternalism, and searing racism.

The more I poked and dug and read, I could not understand why a Black worker in the Jim Crow South would cook his lunch in rosin, a commodity product whose value was determined by its clarity. Were workers really dropping dirty potatoes into rosin that had been distilled and filtered through cotton batting and screens? It sounded like a punishable offense.

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By this point, I had grown mighty suspicious — like, rosin-potatogate conspiracy theory suspicious. With no collective memory — written, recorded, or alive — of rosin potatoes in turpentine camps, I turned my attention away from workers and toward the industry, the bigwigs, moneymakers, and political influencers who might have something to gain from rosin potatoes. 

At the University of Florida’s Smathers Libraries, I hunched over volumes of Naval Stores Review, following two-plus decades of industry exploits. Published weekly from 1890 to 1953 (and later monthly and bimonthly), the Review provides a play-by-play of the industry’s swings, technological advances, best practices, politics, labor woes, and evolving culture. Its pages instructed producers how to convert from harmful box cutting to installing metal gutters and ceramic Herty cups, a method that prolonged trees’ viability and allowed the once mobile industry to put down roots. It documented the move from backwoods distilling to central stills in towns like Baxley, the rise of acid sprays to increase gum production, and every possible use for turpentine and rosin — from soap production in Peru to home insulation, cough syrup, and a depilatory for pigs. 

The Naval Stores Review also chronicled the American Turpentine Farmers Association, or AT-FA, formed in 1936 and led by Judge Harley Langdale, a powerful naval stores producer and politician from Valdosta, Georgia. 

 AT-FA loomed large over the industry’s fading years. Members funded successful national ad campaigns and an effort to get gum turpentine onto retail shelves. The organization supported research and lobbied to classify turpentiners as agricultural workers, exempting producers from minimum wage laws and Social Security taxes. AT-FA administered a federal loan program that sought to limit naval stores production and stabilize market prices. They also threw one helluva party.

Each April, more than a thousand producers and their families would gather in Valdosta for the annual AT-FA Convention. Langdale would rally turpentiners behind the cause of the moment and conjure the industry’s demise if action was not taken, and then get voted in as president for another term.

“The gum industry faces able, aggressive, and intelligent competition from many new spirits companies. This competition must be met by the gum industry or the industry will be swallowed up by it,” he told attendees in 1947.

They’d host a stag-night fish fry for the men, along with a beauty contest in which women dressed in longleaf pine needle bikinis. The weekend would conclude with a picnic featuring 700 barbecued chickens (and ham in later years), peas, grits, potato salad, beer, and Coca-Cola. In 1949, they switched up the menu and harvested Florida sabal palms to make swamp cabbage. 

Had the rosin potato existed in naval stores culture, it should’ve been at that barbecue. Just as Langdale wrapped his arm around each Miss Spirits of Turpentine, he would have been pulling a potato out of the rosin pot for a photo op. Rosin potatoes were also absent from Swainsboro’s Pine Tree Festival, from industry conferences, and from field trips to the Naval Stores Research Station in Olustee, Florida, a hub of scientific advancement for the industry.

Starting with the year 1933, I flipped page by page, year by year, through The Naval Stores Review, expecting to meet the potato at any moment. And there was nothing — until June 1956.

 The year before, N.J. “Jack” Stallworth, whose brother was an AT-FA director, had demonstrated rosin baked potatoes at the Alabama State Fair. Stallworth served the potatoes in his Mobile, Alabama, restaurant, Stafills, and advertised direct-to-consumer rosin in pamphlets, as well as in Gourmet, Living, and House Beautiful. Naval Stores Review did not credit Stallworth or anyone in particular with the invention, but noted, “Rosin baked potatoes is not an entirely new idea, having been initiated some two years ago.” 

In other words, folks in the industry had not eaten rosin potatoes, a “Southern delicacy” as they called them, until 1954. They didn’t associate the newfangled technique with turpentine camp culture, nor did they know when or where the potatoes had been invented.