- 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.

- 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.

This is Homegrown History.

- Gracious.

- Nick, how you doing back there?

- I'm surviving.

- Hey!

- This is it.

See y'all found it.

- Yeah.

- I forgot how far it was too.

- 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.

- 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 actually see all the native plants have grown up around.

But underneath this is 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.

- 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 100 miles northwest.

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

Genesis 6:14, God tells Noah, "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 years 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 boat.

Okay?

- 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.

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.

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

- We didn't have no work for six months.

I was 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 depression, laying in a bathtub, squalling like a baby, I said, "God, I need a new vision."

So while I wasn't working, just came to me one day, "Let's research and see if I'm kin to anybody in this county."

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

Using 18th and 19th century texts, 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 1700s, 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.

- 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, in two ports, Brunswick and Wilmington, that funneled those products into and onto British hulls.

- So from day one in this state, we were in the middle of nasty tar, dipping it at night, and a 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?

- 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 store producer in the Atlantic world.

From the longleaf forests 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.

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 in 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.

- 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 1830s discovery that turpentine mixed with alcohol made a bright, cheap lamp fuel called camphene.

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

And in the years following the Civil War, an estimated 4 to 5 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.

Turn of the millennium, over 90 million acres of longleaf pine that once stood along the southeast were down to 3 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 pitcher 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 back and encourage everyone to replant longleaf and reclaim our natural history and heritage.

- 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 Waccamaw Siouan 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.

- 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.

And it gave us that satisfaction that, you know, we're actually doing what we're supposed to be doing, something greater than us.

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

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

And it really is thinking beyond our lifespan, too.

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

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.

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.

[gentle music] ♪ ♪ ♪