I am by education a forester I was born and reared on a turpentine orchard in South Mississippi and was closely associated with the hands the business and all it entailed Several years after learning that there were no artifacts or history of the production of rosin in the Smithsonian Institute I felt compelled out of respect to the hands and to my people to write some sort of history of the production of rosin Being a graduate forester I was well aware of the impossibility of being able to research and write a technical work on rosin production I deemed it necessary to write a fictional account of the operation with all the facts pertaining to rosin as accurate and as true as I could make them The book that emerged is a novel of some 135 000 words I ve used three generations of a fictional family the McBrides in compiling the book They closely resemble my own family s activities for the period covering 1814 in South Carolina to 1940 in Mississippi Basically this book is about three things the hands the masters or orchard owners and how they went about their daily lives producing that hard won product rosin from the trees