Caladium Capital of the World Town of Murals

Sebring - Sebring native Gene Brown finds himself attracting crowds from around the state.
The crowds, made up of tourists visiting various Florida state parks, gather around the amateur historian to learn not only about turpentine, Florida's first major industry, but also something about working conditions at the turn of the century.

Gene Brown, a Sebring native, demonstrates the lost art of making turpentine by hand.

Those with any insight also leave Brown's demonstrations with a new appreciation of the beauty of long leaf pine.
When Brown quit school at 15, he didn't harbor much of a love of history. Moving to Georgia to join his sister, he went to work for a timber company, which gave him his first real taste of the turpentine business.
For nearly two years, the teen was assigned "chipping" and "dipping" duties. He'd have to walk through the forests, visit every single pine tree, cut a new set of gashes over those he'd cut the week earlier, and then collect the week's drippings of sticky sap.
"It was real demanding work," he recalled as he stepped outside his Silver Fox home and used a "hack," a weighted hand tool, to coax a doorstep pine to weep a share of the tree's raw energy.
Twenty years later, following a varied career that included that of a small-town police chief in Georgia, Brown found himself working as a ranger at Highlands Hammock State Park. As part of his job, he was assigned to come up with an interpretive talk for park visitors.
Developing the talk proved easy: He fell back onto his sap-collecting youth. After retrieving his old collection of tools, still in storage in Georgia, Brown donned his costume and began showing park visitors - adults and youth alike - what it meant to earn a full day's pay: $3.
"The kids are amazed at how hard it was" to collect and then process the sap. "You can talk to them until they're blue in the face, but showing them says a lot more than anything I can say."
Although Brown no longer works as a park ranger, he still works for the park system as a volunteer, giving his talk at other state parks, which promotes a series of summer festivals. In his travels - usually about four times a year - he works alongside a number of lost craftspeople: trappers, soldiers, weavers, coopers, spinners, cowboys, wood carvers, indigo dyers, and iron workers. Brown is the turpentiner.
"I like to pass on the knowledge" of what the turpentine business was all about. Its heyday was the late 1800s and early 1900s, when the boiled tree sap was regarded as Florida's first natural resource. Brown's research showed that Highlands County was perhaps the industry's southernmost point. Venus had a still. And, he added, he understands there are still old turpentine families living in Lake Placid.
In such communities, turpentine was bigger than cattle, and certainly bigger than citrus.
Even now, Brown can still spot the scars of healing on mature long leaf pines. On a recent walk through the woods in the area behind Hill-Gustat Middle School in Sun 'n Lake, he found a broken clay cup. It was the same type once hung under the trees' "cat faces" - the name given to the angled herringbone cuts made in the bark.
The find really didn't surprise him: Sap was collected from all over Florida.

"Cat Face"

Brown's young woods experience has given him a deep appreciation for the common long leaf pine, distinguished by its extra-tall height and nearly foot-long needles. At one time, Florida had stands over 300,000 acres; now there are only about 30,000 acres left. Because the trees are the tallest and take 100 years to mature, they are the first to be cut for timber. Foresters - not even those in the parks - replant with the less stately slash pine, which matures in just 20 years.
It was a rainy day back in 1994 when Brown, manning the entrance building at Highlands Hammock State Park, found himself thinking about the plight of the native tree growing just across the road. He found himself waxing poetic, and in bout 45 minutes penned a poem, which he has since copyrighted.
He freely hands the poem out to park to park visitors who hear him speak. Almost every one leaves with a copy. A common reaction to his talk is the desire to go out and plant some long leaf pines.
Draining some of the sap doesn't hurt the trees, said Brown. In the industry's beginnings, loggers would first cut a large hole in the base of the tree, which eventually killed them. Then the cat face technique was adopted, which saved the tree. Now, the pine sap is chemically extracted from felled trees.
"We;ve come full circle," he pointed out. "They're back to killing the trees."
Brown does his part to raise awareness about the dwindling number of long leafs. On his five acres just south of the park's expanding boundaries, he has also planted 106 seedlings that now stand about three-foot high. They, along with his talks, may be among Brown's legacy.
Brown is willing to give his demonstration to local groups. Call: 863-314-8730