We must not leave this extensive family of trees without adverting to their numerous and important uses. In the United States, full four-fifths of all the houses built are constructed of the White and Yellow Pine, chiefly of the former. Soft, easily worked, light and fine in texture, it is almost universally employed in carpentry, and for all the purposes of civil architecture; while the tall stately trunks furnish masts and spars, not only for our own vessels, but many of those of England. A great commerce is therefore carried on in the timber of this tree, and vast quantities of the boards, etc., are annually exported to Europe. The Yellow and Pitch Pine furnish much of the enormous supplies of fuel consumed by the great number of steamboats employed in navigating our numerous inland rivers. The Long-leaved Pine is the great timber tree of the southern states; and when we take into account all its various products, we must admit it to be the most valuable tree of the whole family. The consumption of the wood of this tree in building, in the southern states, is immense; and its sap furnishes nearly all the turpentine, tar, pitch, and rosin, used in this country, or exported to Europe. The turpentine flows from large incisions made in the trunk (into boxes fastened to the side of the trees for that purpose) during the whole of the spring and summer. Spirit of turpentine is obtained from this by distillation. Tar is procured by burning the dead wood in kilns, when it flows out in a current from a conduit made in the bottom. Pitch is prepared by boiling tar until it is about one half diminished in bulk; and rosin is the residuum of the distillation when spirit of turpentine is made. The Carolinas produce all these in the greatest abundance, and so long ago as 1807, the exportation of them to England alone amounted to nearly $800,000 in that single year.
