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| Tommy Lanigan pulls potatoes from a cast-iron kettle of liquefied rosin. Photo: Carol W. Waters. |
"We weren't able to find any tar," explains Jerry Lanigan, vice president of the Portal Heritage Society.
Without pine tar, festival organizers can't make turpentine in the town's still, which until this year was the nation's only continuously operating turpentine cooker. And without turpentine, there's no rosin, which is the fancy name for the vapors that rise from heated tar. And without rosin, there aren't any rosin potatoes, a staunchly vernacular folk dish that was developed in the 1930s by workers at Portal's turpentine plant.
"Everybody loves them," Lanigan says of the potatoes, which bake in a pool of melted rosin. "We have people who try them and say 'I don't know why I haven't tried them before.' It's one of the old arts."
When the Carter family boldly hopped into the turpentine game, creating much-needed jobs in Depression-struck Portal, turpentine was considered the material with a million uses. Ballplayers rubbed it on their bats, fiddle players wiped it on their bows and bootblacks polished shoes with it. Folks who worked closely with turpentine stuck it in their medicine cabinets – "you have a lot of old-timers [still using] it for cuts," says Lanigan. "They'll pour it on a real bad scratch, or put it on a little bit of sugar and use it for medicine" – and pantries.
"It's something different, but it's part of Portal's history," Lanigan says. "You just have to be very careful because the hot rosin will take your skin off."
The Portal Heritage Society, which didn't have any luck importing pine tar, is now investigating "a new way to maybe produce our own," Lanigan reports. To run the still, the society needs six barrels of tar, or the approximate output of 20 acres of pine trees. So anxious are the townspeople to find the stuff that a town hall clerk, when asked by a reporter for Lanigan's contact information, responded "Do you have any tar?"
While the society has sufficient back stock for one more round of rosin potatoes, Lanigan stays committed to producing turpentine for the 29th edition of the festival next year. "It's part of our history, and it would be nice to keep it going. It's just something we'd all love to see continue."
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