McCranie's Turpentine Still

The McCranies Turpentine Still is the best-preserved wood-burning turpentine still known in Georgia. It is of the style of the 19th Century stills, their design borrowed from the North Carolina Whiskey distillers, c. 1830. The use of copper in large amounts for the kettle, condenser, and worm (or coil) caused most stills of this type to be destroyed for their copper when they fell into disuse. This major change began around 1940 when the Naval Stores Industry changed to steam distillation for the processing of gum (resin). When the old stills began to be abandoned as obsolete, they were often broken up, either by the owners or by vandals, and the copper was sold. Although this particular still operated only from 1936-1942, the last one of this type ceased production, in Georgia, in 1958.

Being built in 1936, very late in the evolution of the Naval Stores processes, McCranies was almost an anachronism when completed, since the Depression had brought government price supports and controls into the ailing Naval Stores Industry and thus a major revolution in the techniques of turpentine production.

Georgia has been the leading state in turpentine production since 1923, and originally! gained her premier position through the production of turpentine and rosin from localized stills like this one, run by the individual farmer. When the industry modernized and centralized after the Depression with the onset of government price support and research into newer methods of extracting turpentine, the farmers were eventually motivated to bring their raw gum (resin) to the centralized and regional steam distillation centers and the old, individualized stills like McCranie's became obsolete and thus began disappearing rapidly.

The McCranie family, like many others in South Georgia on the coastal plain, have long! been involved with the pine industry. They have carefully maintained this still as a family memorial to their own beginnings in the Pine Industry and have kept many of the relics of those earlier days, including many of the "Herty" Turpentine Cups, invented by Georgia's Dr. Charles Holmes Herty, c. 1902, and perfected under the employ of the U.S. Forest Service in nearby Ocilla, Ga. The Herty Cup (of clay) greatly changed the methodology of collecting gum (resin) from the pine tree and was a major step toward the conservation of pine resources by replacing the "box" method of cutting into a tree to create a cup for the gum, to collecting the gum through the use of the clay cup hung on the side of the tree. These clay cups and their successors prevented the great destruction of many trees, especially the outside layers for timber, and eventually allowed controlled planting! of trees to facilitate collecting the gum through mechanized means. At the McCranie still, there are not only many clay and iron cups but several examples of trees damaged by the earlier "box" method, all showing the evolution of the turpentining processes.