- [Announcer] Funding for "Homegrown History" is provided in part by SECU Foundation, funded by the members of State Employees' Credit Union, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

[piano intro] - [Sandra] Before there was a revolution or a constitution, there was longleaf pine and coal.

These resources were traded, fought over, and used to win independence.

And that had us thinking, what could our natural history tell us about the America we know today?

This is "Homegrown History."

When British explorers discovered the longleaf pine, they saw empire.

A vast forest full of the raw materials they needed to grow the British Navy, conquer their enemies, and become ruler of the seas.

- But if I told you the entire coast of the Carolinas was covered in oil wells today, that's what it meant to England at that time.

- [Sandra] The coveted asset of the colonies, the longleaf pine supplied a commodity that was essential for sustaining the world's most powerful navy.

But when the colonies rebelled, embargoes threatened the future of an empire and a nation yearning to be free.

To uncover this history, we visited a group dedicated to reviving the craft of this lost industry and the stewards fighting to preserve the pine's future.

[flames crackling] [upbeat music] - [Nick] Gracious.

- Nick, how you doing back there?

- I'm surviving.

- Okay.

- This is it.

- See, y'all found it?

- [Ashley] Yeah.

- I forgot how far it was too.

- [Sandra] We're on Waccamaw Siouan tribal land.

A little over a year ago, the tribe planted 25 acres of longleaf pine here.

And we're being guided to a place where the tribe held a ritual marking the occasion.

- [Nick] The path was actually all the way over to here.

- So hooheh is our traditional word for a longleaf pine.

They're currently in the grass stages, so they're really low to the ground and you can, as you can see, all the native plants have grown up around, but underneath this is a longleaf pine.

We have about 4,000 that are out here.

We're just really excited to be able to have this for the tribal community.

- [Sandra] Long before the British arrived in the Americas, indigenous people of the coastal plain lived with and relied on a vast longleaf forest that ran along the eastern seaboard, over 90 million acres of it.

When the British discovered this ecological masterpiece, they quickly realized they'd found a solution they'd been looking for.

A forest full of exactly what they needed to keep their navy afloat.

To explain that, we're taking you a hundred miles northwest.

- [Bryan] We're going to start out in the Bible.

Genesis 6:14, God tells Noah to build an ark and pitch it inside and out with pitch.

That's pine product, okay?

So we're not talking about something that started here 200 year ago.

We're talking about something that goes all the way back to the beginnings of when they started making ships and putting wood together.

You've got to caulk those cracks to keep the water out of the boats, okay?

- [Sandra] Brian Avery is a self-taught expert in naval stores.

A forgotten term for tar, pitch, and turpentine, resin-based products harvested from trees and used to protect wooden boats from water.

Here, along the banks of the Cape Fear River, Brian's in the middle of what he calls.

- The greatest naval store show on earth.

Probably the only naval store show on Earth.

And what I'm going to do, we're going to do a show if y'all want to know it all from beginning to end.

Just pile up right here.

- [Sandra] But the greatest naval store show on Earth may never have been created if it weren't for the Great Recession of 2007.

- We ain't had no work for six months.

Just sitting at home staring at the wall.

Didn't know I was kin to a soul in this county.

Had not a clue.

So in the Depression, laying in a bathtub squirreling like a baby, I said, "God, I need a new vision."

So while I wasn't working, he just came to me one day.

Let's research and see if I'm kin to anybody in this county.

- [Sandra] Brian discovered that his ancestor was involved in the pine trade and down the rabbit hole he went.

Using 18th and 19th century text, Brian taught himself just about everything a person could about the colonial history of the longleaf pine in North Carolina.

This is what he learned.

In the colonial era, the British Navy was one of the most powerful military forces on Earth, but it was in a bind.

Nearly every element of their naval and merchant fleets, the hulls, the rigging, the mast, required regular, if not constant supply of naval stores.

Without them, their fleet would rot at anchor or sink at sea.

England had once supplied itself with its own naval stores, but by the early 1700's, those forests were long gone.

- They had no way of making these products over there.

But yet, they were using them every minute and needed them desperately.

- [Sandra] A century into England's American colonial experiment, their Navy depended on a supply chain controlled by a single monopoly, the Stockholm Tar Company, which was controlled by Sweden.

So in 1705, desperate to incentivize naval stores production in the colonies, the British Parliament passed the Naval Stores Act, which offered incentives to colonists who produced tar, pitch, and turpentine for the Royal Navy.

The engine of that production?

North Carolina's Cape Fear river basin.

Vast longleaf pine savannas, an extensive river system that provided transport from the piney woods to the sea and two ports, Brunswick and Wilmington, that funneled those products into and onto British holes.

- So from day one in this state, we were in the middle of nasty tar dipping it at night, you know, deer run by and you sprinkle it on the ground and step in it.

It was all over your clothes.

I'm dirty and I ain't even making nothing, okay?

- [Sandra] Making naval stores was hot, dirty work.

For days, laborers often enslaved, would toil around fires slowly rendering the products they needed from the pine tree.

Each had its own purpose for a ship.

Tar for rope and riggings, pitch for caulking the seams of a ship, and turpentine, which was kept on hand as a solvent.

Within decades, North Carolina became the dominant naval stores producer in the Atlantic world.

From the longleaf forest of the Cape Fear River Valley alone, colonists produced hundreds of thousands of barrels of naval stores worth 50,000 pounds annually.

By 1768, North Carolina was producing 60% of all naval stores exported from the American colonies.

And with this new valuable export came leverage against the crown.

That's when the trouble began.

[dramatic music] You've probably heard about colonists rebelling over tea, but did you know that eight years before the Boston Tea Party, the British made their first attempt to directly tax the colonies?

It was called the Stamp Act and it was not popular because it was a law that required colonists to pay a tax on all printed materials, documents, newspapers, and even playing cards, with all that revenue going directly to the crown.

When a ship transporting the stamps made it to the port of Brunswick Town, musket wielding colonists blocked it from unloading and shut down every export leaving the port.

Records say that barrels of naval stores were soon overflowing warehouses and were being stacked along the streets.

In the next conflict over the Stamp Act, Crown officials tried to block merchant ships to make them pay the tax.

In response, at least 500 armed men marched on the governor's residence to make their grievances known.

This was almost a decade before the Boston Tea Party, making it one of the first instances of armed resistance to British taxation and the American colonies.

By 1774, the first provincial Congress knew they had leverage and they made it explicit.

Unless American grievances were addressed, they would not export tar, pitch, or turpentine.

England's response was too little, too late.

Once again, England found itself cut off from a supply it couldn't live without.

But the story of the tree in North Carolina didn't end then, because after the Revolutionary War, demand for longleaf pine products soared.

And eventually that 90 million acre longleaf pine forest that ran from Virginia to Texas was decimated.

- So if you want to grow longleaf pines in your yard, first you would need some sunlight.

Second, I would advise proximity of at least 25 to 30 feet away from your home.

- [Sandra] Earl Ijames is one of a growing number of longleaf pine preservationists fighting to bring the longleaf back.

It's an uphill battle.

Demand for turpentine exploded after an 1830's discovery that turpentine mixed with alcohol made a bright, cheap land fuel called camphine.

Railroads in the industrial era made exploiting longleaf pines scalable and profitable.

And in the years following the Civil War, an estimated four to five million acres of North Carolina longleaf pine dwindled to less than 60,000.

Then came the 20th century policy of fire suppression, a nationwide effort to stop wildfires as fast as possible.

But the problem is the longleaf needs fire.

Its seeds take a long time to root and grow.

And historically, seasonal fires have helped clear forest floors and keep competing species at bay.

Take away the fire and faster growing hardwoods move in and shade the fire-resistant longleaf seeds out.

By the turn of the millennium, over 90 million acres of longleaf pine that once stood along the southeast were down to three million.

A 97% collapse.

An ecological crisis on multiple levels.

Because the thing about the longleaf pine is that it's not just a tree, it's a keystone species.

Without it, an entire ecosystem collapses.

- In a hardwood ecosystem and in a commercial ecosystem, you're not going to get many native plants growing.

Things like picture plants, things like Venus fly traps, animals like red cockaded woodpeckers won't come back, but at the very least, we still have the opportunity to harvest seeds from existing longleaf pines from forests that we now cultivate these and reintroduce this back and encourage everyone to replant longleaf and reclaim our natural history and heritage.

- [Sandra] Reclaiming heritage and collaboration is at the heart of longleaf pine restoration efforts across the state.

Earl Ijames and Brian Avery have planted hundreds of longleaf pines together and they're not alone.

Back on Wakamatsuan tribal land, we're witnessing how this community is writing the next chapter of natural history.

- We know that our people use fire to maintain the land, especially for the hooheh and many of the other crops that were used to survive.

It's seen in many studies that fire is good for the soil itself.

We try to encourage a lot of our farmers to instead of spray, we come in, we help burn, we bring things back to the soil, because all those nutrients that are released in that fire process goes back to the soil that makes it healthier for future crops.

- [Sandra] A year ago, after a week of controlled burns, the community gathered here to witness 13 matriarchs plant longleaf pines.

And the folks leading the tribe's reforestation and burn program are bringing plaques to mark the location where the trees were planted.

- One of the things that was really special is as older people get, you know, up in age, a lot of times they're forgotten about.

The younger generations don't take time to go sit with them.

And we've heard this throughout our tribe.

Our elders saying, "Oh, like there's no use for me anymore."

So it was a very special moment for a lot of them.

It was very fulfilling for us as well.

Kind of gave us that satisfaction that, you know, we're actually doing what we're supposed to be doing.

Something greater than us.

- [Sandra] One day, years from now, those pines will be shaped into a traditional meeting house called an oyoke surrounded by a forest of longleaves with walking trails.

- We want it to be where community can come out and experience a forest.

And it really is thinking beyond our lifespan too.

I mean, I'm young, but I'm not too young.

I might be, I might still be here whenever the forest grows up, but the hope is to plant for the next seven generations.

So the work that we do here is going to be work that's going to carry on through the next seven generations for our tribe.

And other tribes can also, and everyone around, really come and experience it.

But it takes a lot of forethought and planning and faith to be able to see something before it happens.

- [Sandra] Those longleaf pines will take decades to mature.

But a hundred miles north in the heart of the state, an element lay deep beneath the surface for nearly 250 million years, and it would change the course of our history.

You may not think about North Carolina as coal country.

Pennsylvania?

Yeah.

West Virginia, definitely.

The Tarhill state?

Not really.

But the truth is, in the heart of this state, there's a coal field with a long history of national consequence, from the Revolutionary War all the way through the Industrial Revolution.

So we traveled there to look into this story.

Our reporting took us to a church founded in secret by enslaved people in the Civil War.

- When I was young, this was a place where a horse and buggy was still riding up and down the road.

- [Sandra] And to a graveyard that tells the story of North Carolina's deadliest industrial disaster.

- Everything comes with a price and they paid a big one.

- [Sandra] The story we found is a story of coal's promise and its price, of war, of southern industrial ambition, and of the struggle for workers' rights.

Our story begins along the banks of the Deep River where a 36-mile long coal field runs along a geological formation called the Triassic Basin.

It's 250 million years old.

Settlers discovered the coal here just before the American Revolution.

And when they did, it became a tool for revolution.

But to explain how, we've got to take you here, out to the coast of North Carolina.

[soft piano music] In 1775, colonial discontent with British rule had reached a fever pitch.

People were taking sides, forging alliances, and preparing for war.

But there were colonists whose livelihoods were completely tied to trade with the British, like Thomas McKnight, a landowner, a politician, and a shipbuilder.

When the time came to two sides, he chose the Crown.

In North Carolina's second provincial Congress, McKnight was the only representative who refused to endorse a complete boycott of British goods.

That choice cost him.

The assembly issued a province-wide boycott of his enterprises.

And a year later, they confiscated all his property, including 39 enslaved people owned by McKnight and his associates.

Soon, these people would be forced into a new kind of labor, arming the soldiers who fought for independence.

As this went on in the east, patriot officials dispatched a team to investigate a Deep River iron forge owned by a man named John Wilcox.

The revolution needed weapons, but the colonists had always counted on the British to provide them.

And that door had just slammed shut.

They'd have to make them on their own and Deep River had exactly what they needed to do it.

It was there that the team found iron, fuel to refine it, and a vision of a future where the United States didn't depend on any other kingdom or country for national security.

So the state purchased the furnace and those 39 enslaved people confiscated from loyalists out east were sent to Deep River where they did the dirty backbreaking work of mining coal and manning the furnace, and the highly skilled work of manufacturing patriot cannons, cannonballs, and grape shot.

But it turned out in the summer, the river's water supply was too low, which limited the furnace's output, raising questions about the viability of the enterprise.

Within six months, the state returned the furnace to Wilcox, but it retained control of the enslaved people they'd sent there who worked the furnace for the rest of the war.

After the war, the state returned the laborers to McKnight and his associates and the industrial promise of these coal fields faded, until the Confederate war machine came calling.

[dramatic music] 15 miles from that old Patriot furnace sits a cornerstone at the foot of an institution built by enslaved people in Deep River before the Civil War.

Angel Mills' family has been a part of this church for generations.

- Yeah, some of these are unmarked over here and then behind the church, there's several unmarked graves as well.

- Saint Paul AME Zion is one of the oldest Black churches in the area.

- This church is originally one that was founded in 1849.

It was founded under a brush arbor by enslaved individuals who met together and worshiped together because there was nowhere else for them to really go where they could worship in the way they wanted to worship.

- [Sandra] When services here first began, church members met in secret and they did so at great risk.

The state had outlawed religious gatherings for free and enslaved people of color and made it a crime punishable by 39 lashes.

In 1861, North Carolina seceded from the Union and the Deep River coal fields became a focus of the Confederacy.

To survive secession from the industrialized North, the Confederacy had to figure out how to power locomotives, forge weapons, and manufacture munitions with its own resources and they need coal to do that.

Because the major coal fields in Pennsylvania and West Virginia were under federal control, the Confederacy had to look elsewhere.

And mining had expanded in Deep River after an 1828 geological survey praised its untapped potential.

Locks like these and dams were added along the river, which opened new markets for the area's products.

So a year after secession, North Carolina built this, the Endor furnace, a mass smelting furnace that produced iron for the Confederacy.

And again, the state brought in enslaved laborers to produce munitions for war.

But as you know, the Confederacy failed.

Eventually, so did the Endor furnace.

Today, Saint Paul AME Zion is one of the few institutions of that era that's endured and thrived.

[dramatic music] But the story of coal in Deep River wasn't over yet, because coal remained an essential resource across the United States.

In the years following the Civil War, investors doubled down on the Deep River coal mines.

Mining towns formed during the era of railroad expansion and the industrial boom and Black and white workers from near and far settled in the area and worked the mines side by side.

But across the country, the conditions in coal mines were harsh and sometimes fatal.

There were limited safety measures or ventilation and most workers would not be able to stand upright in them.

And yet, production rose across the nation.

And with it, risk.

During this coal boom, 70,000 miners died on the job.

Some of them here in Deep River.

First, an explosion in Deep River's Cumnock mine left over 40 miners dead.

Then an explosion in Deep River's Egypt coal mine killed 22 men.

But in 1925, the biggest disaster of all struck.

We're here with Debbie Hall looking for a headstone where her kin is buried.

- The people that keep up this graveyard, it always looks exactly like this, so beautiful.

And we're so appreciative that they do that.

This is the grave of Henry Grady Hall who was killed in the mine in 1925.

- [Sandra] A few miles down the road from the cemetery sits the entrance of the Coal Glen mine.

On Monday, May 25th, 1925, Debbie's grandfather arrived here for work.

- He went to work in the mine on Monday morning and the story he tells was, as he started into the mine, the rats and bugs were coming out.

He remembered that an old coal miner had told him, "If things are coming out of the mine, you don't go in."

So he told people and told his brother as well.

And he quit because he was so convinced that he should not go into the mine.

But his brother chose not to quit.

And then two days later was when the explosion happened.

[soft music] - [Sandra] The explosions came in two waves.

Years later, a local reported that the sky went dark with dust and smoke after.

Dozens of men were trapped.

Rescue efforts took days.

Thousands of people from across North Carolina came to offer a helping hand, while mining families stood by waiting to find out if their loved ones were among the dead.

A photojournalist named Ben Dixon MacNeill documented the heart-wrenching scene.

Debbie found her grandfather in one of these pictures standing near the mine entrance waiting for his brother.

Investigators determined poor ventilation led to a buildup of flammable gas that caused the explosion, which is similar to what had caused previous accidents at Deep River mines.

In total, 53 men and three mules lost their lives.

To this day, it's North Carolina's deadliest industrial accident.

One of the men who died was Debbie's great uncle, Henry Grady Hall.

He's buried here at the Farmville Cemetery less than a mile from the entrance to the Coal Glen Mine.

- Five miners are buried here.

They were the last five to come out of the mine.

For those of us who are history people, those of us that so revere the people that built this area, this country and here, it is a sacred place.

[birds chirping] - [Sandra] One final tragedy catalyzed permanent change at the Deep River coal fields.

In 1928, North Carolina leased 182 Black convicts to work the mines, making it the last convict leasing program in the country.

A year later, four of these men died in a mining accident and public outrage over the convict leasing program grew.

The program ended and North Carolina passed its first Workers' Compensation Act, a turning point born from disaster.

The act guaranteed injured workers' compensation for medical expenses and lost wages without having to prove that their employer was at fault.

By the 1950s, the mines had closed for good.

[unsettling music] [soft music] Today, timber operations and housing developments have replaced mining sites and the river that was once used for trade is now a site of recreation.

The Deep River's complicated history lives on.

If you're willing to ask and listen, this place full of people who want to share, who really believe that remembering matters.

- I mean, this church is a community.

That is what, you know, our forefathers did that built this place.

They found this as an important place for worship, for education, for just having people to depend on and build family outside of your nuclear family, your extended family.

I hope that as we progress and more people move here, that we can welcome in new people as well as those new people seek us out and want to know about this place that they're living in and what it was like.

Because I think that's really important to pass down.

- [Sandra] Evidence of the area's mining and labor history lives on and the cemeteries that connect families to their ancestors who built and bled for this community, and closed mine shafts and weathered iron furnaces, and in the memories of the people who believe this history matters.

And the mining disasters of yesterday hold lessons for the community today.

- I think it's important for people to know and remember these people because of their sacrifice.

But I do think they're a reminder to us that everything comes with a price and they paid a big one.

[dramatic music] - [Sandra] If you know of local history that we should be aware of, please reach out at the website below or scan the QR code on your screen now to share your history with us.

- [Narrator] Funding for "Homegrown History" is provided in part by SECU Foundation, funded by the members of State Employees Credit Union, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

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