4
McCaskill came down from Georgia. McCaskill had a son-
in-law named Pusley (Dubey's grandfather) and they
started a turpentine place at Argyle in West Florida.
They got their business in operation and a hurricane came
along and blew down their timber.
In those days, they cut boxes at the foot of the tree and
those boxes were cut with long bladed axes. I've often
thought about this, back in the days when we used to say that
Black people could not develop any skills, I remembered how
well they could cut boxes in trees. It required a great
deal of skill to cut a smooth box at the bottom of a tree
that would hold from one to two quarts of pine gum. And I
can remember that kind of operation. In 1914-15, my father
put up fourteen crops of boxes. Fourteen crops would mean
140,000 trees had boxes cut into them in 1914 and '15. The
last big operation of that kind in West Florida I expect, be-
cause after that cups, first clay and then tin and then
aluminum cups replaced the old boxes. There were cups prior
to that time, they were introduced about 1912, but we didn't
have any of them, and they were difficult to apply. Actually
the first ones were clay and there were disadvantages to the
use of clay. If they were allowed to remain on the tree until
the winter time, and there was a rain and the water turned to
ice, the cups would be broken. So my father did not believe
in clay cups and he recruited large numbers of skilled boxcutters
and cut fourteen crops in 1914-15.
P: How large of a Black crew was worked on this turpentine plantation?
L: I can't remember. I've thought about it many times later, even
when I was in college. We must have several hundred families
on our place, but in more recent years I've become more
realistic and I-doubt if we had more than fifty or seventy-five
Black families and about three or four White families at the
most.
P: What else, besides cutting and placing the boxes, did the
Black laborers do?
L: Well, then that was done usually in the winter time, and
then in the spring of the year they began to chip the faces.
Before that they had to put gutters on the trees, but not
for boxes, just for cups. Those gutters were made of tin and