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lasting leather. Alternating layers of bark and skins are placed in a large ‘bath’ with thick layers of additional bark for the base and cover layers. The whole thing sits there to ooze for about a month as the acid and tannin work their magic. The skins are then gently removed; the moisture pressed out, and newly ‘minted’ leather sometimes stretched on frames to achieve surface uniformity.
Specialized related trades were part of the business. Today, a ‘barker’ is most likely a neighborhood dog with an attention seeking disorder, but in times past the term applied to folks who stripped the bark from trees to get the associated tannin. Families living on the Blue Ridge collected small quantities of bark as an equivalent of cash to be sold when neo essary to the local tanners.
In our . region, Chestnut, Chestnut Oak and Hemlock trees were the most common sources of tannin. During the Civil War the U.S. Government mandated use of Chestnut Oak because it’s bark was one of the most acidic. Leather produced with it was also able to accept black dyes quite well. Hemlock tannin, in contrast, was more problematic causing such problems as cracking and fading. The amount of bark used in the process is quite boggling: 260,000 lbs. of tanbark per WEEK shipped from Front Royal in the 1890s. As Elvis might say, that was indicative of “a whole lot a barkin’ goin’ on”! Like any consumption of an ‘inexhaustible’ resource (oil comes to mind today) the piper playing this economic tune was going to ask for payment big time eventually; it took a little while to pay this piper, but not really all that long.
The tanning industry gradually consolidated following the Civil War. One of the largest of the commercial outfits, the Virginia Oak Tannery in Luray, began operation in 1882. By now, the volume of processing was so large that the raw hides came from far way; read The West. Big operations like this also needed to be fed with lots and lots of bark and people were ready.
Rappahannock County had a fairly large barking operation. John Miller, owner of Mountain Green in
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