Tar Heels and the Cape Fear River Trade

The nickname for North Carolinians, Tar Heel, may have its roots in the exact landscape you are passing through.

For more than a century, from roughly the seventeen twenties through the Civil War era, the longleaf pine forests of the Sandhills were the most economically productive forests on the American Atlantic coast. Workers, many of them enslaved, extracted sap from living trees by cutting wounds in the bark and letting the resin bleed into collection boxes. This raw gum was then processed into tar, pitch, and turpentine, collectively known as naval stores because wooden ships required them constantly to preserve hulls, caulk seams, and waterproof rigging.

By seventeen sixty-eight, North Carolina was producing sixty percent of all naval stores made in the British colonies. The Cape Fear River was the highway that made it possible. Workers loaded barrels onto flatboats at Cross Creek and floated them down to Wilmington, where ocean-going ships waited.

The origins of the nickname are disputed, but one version holds that workers in the turpentine stills got tar on their feet so often that it became a regional identifier. Tar Heel. It stuck.

Fayetteville sat at the center of this trade, as the upriver hub where the forest economy met the river system. When the longleaf pines were exhausted by generations of tapping, when the railroad made the river route obsolete, Fayetteville had to find new reasons for existing. It found them, eventually, in the Army.

But this land, the sandy soil and the scattered surviving longleaf pines you can still see at the edges of the road, was once the most valuable forest in North America.