. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. James Battle Averitt barrels in 1847 to more than 120,000 a decade later, every 50,000-barrel increase in output came at the expense of another 250,000 acres of piney woods. Even turpentine orchards as large as the Rich Lands eventually succumbed to ax and roundshave. During the turpentining boom, planters such as the Aviretts, with heavy investments in slaves and land, rushed to box new longleaf stands. It was a self- destructive spiral downward. Many reportedly collected only the first season's pine sap,
. Coast watch. Marine resources; Oceanography; Coastal zone management; Coastal ecology. James Battle Averitt barrels in 1847 to more than 120,000 a decade later, every 50,000-barrel increase in output came at the expense of another 250,000 acres of piney woods. Even turpentine orchards as large as the Rich Lands eventually succumbed to ax and roundshave. During the turpentining boom, planters such as the Aviretts, with heavy investments in slaves and land, rushed to box new longleaf stands. It was a self- destructive spiral downward. Many reportedly collected only the first season's pine sap, the so-called "virgin dip," because it earned the highest prices. High winds, disease and pine beetles ravaged the weakened trees. And controlled burns and free-grazing hogs consumed young seedlings, depriving the forest of a chance to regenerate. Confronted by dying forests, many turpentiners abandoned North Carolina. They shifted the naval stores industry's center to the pine barrens of South Carolina and Georgia, then onto the uplands of Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, and finally to eastern Texas. Depression hit the piney woods of Onslow County, and the population plummeted 30 percent between 1820 and 1860. Many of John Avirett's closest friends survived by diversifying into railroads, shipping or banking. Avirett did not. He was a man of the earth, and he clung tenaciously — and fatally — to the Rich Lands. Personal tragedy hastened his downfall. In February of 1851, the Rich Lands manor house burned to the ground. Not long after, he lost two daughters during childbirth. The fresh graves and dead longleafs must have made the Rich Lands seem like a cursed place in the 1850s. Yet only nostalgia, and not a word of these tragedies, is found in The Old Plantation. The final straw came in 1857. John Avirett, by then a pitiful figure, sold the family's new house and 10,000 acres for $25,000. He abdicated another 10,000 acres "together with the turpentine d
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookcollectionunclibra, booksubjectoceanography
