Oilville?

                                                                  Oilville?

How Oilville, Virginia got its unusual name. While sleuthing the origin and location of Oilville’s forgotten history, you will learn about Sassafras (Virginia ' s forgotten second most important export),  a short history of Root Beer, and how an illegal Virginia party drug can affect Cambodian forests.

The exit names along Interstate 64 between Richmond and Charlottesville present a diversion for the truly bored, or for those with imagination.  Rockville-Manakin?  No, the name Rockville does not come from the fact that here is the fall line separating the sedimentary alluvial plain from the rocky piedmont. Rockville had a postmaster named Rock.  Manakin received it name because the Huguenot settlers mispronounced the Monacan Indian village they occupied in the 1700s.  Gum Springs and Hadensville seem obvious enough.  The Louisa-Ferncliff exit was charmingly used as the pseudonym of a Charlottesville WTJU radio personality, as well as the name of a character in Chickahominy Fever: A Civil War Mystery, penned by Richmonder Ann McMillan.

Most people know Short Pump was a place where there was a pump with a short handle.  But what about Oilville’s name? Located in Goochland County, it is a small unincorporated community.  One the first coal mines in America was near here.  Could there be a La Brea style oil seep nearby? Or, being located on US Rt. 250, was it a popular pit stop for oil thirsty Model “T‘s”. My email to the Goochland County Historical Society produced a surprising answer. There was a Sassafras oil producing plant there in the 1900‘s.

The Virginia Tech’s web site teaches us that Sassafras Albidum is a widely distributed eastern tree known for its aromatic nature. It is a pioneer on abandoned and neglected lands, and provides browse material and fruit for wildlife.  It matures into a small to medium sized tree up to 60 feet tall.  Its blooms are small but quite showy, bright yellow-green. The twigs have a spicy-sweet aroma when broken. The bark is brown, becoming coarsely ridged and furrowed; when cut the spicy aroma is obvious. Its leaves are distinctive, 3 to 6 inches long with 1 to 3 lobes; the 2-lobed leaf resembles a mitten, the 3-lobed leaf resembles a trident; green above and below and fragrant when crushed.  In the fall they turn a brilliant red, yellow, and orange color. 

                                            3 lobed sassafras leaves showing fall coloration

                                                              1, 2 and 3 lobe leaves

The sassafras tree was first noted by Europeans in 1512 when Ponce de Leon landed in Florida, mistaking it for a type of cinnamon tree. It was sometimes characterized as North America’s “only native spice”. An early reference to it was in a list of drugs imported from the "Province of Virginia" into England in 1610.

 For a time in the 1600’s, Sassafras was America’s number two export to Europe, just behind tobacco. The Europeans no doubt learned its practical and medicinal uses from the Native Americans. Somehow in Europe it got a reputation as a treatment for syphilis and as a tonic for longevity, explaining its popularity.

It was primarily used as a medicine for infections, and a spring tonic.  The wood, being rot resistant was used in fencing and canoe manufacture.  As an  aromatic wood , it was thought to repel insects, particularly lice. The bark produced a fine orange dye, called Shikih by Native Americans.  And the Cajuns learned from the Native Americans that the leaves, when dried and ground into a powder, produced a flavorful thickener for gumbo, called filé.

While initially prepared by boiling dried root bark in a tea, oil of sassafras became the first volatile oil distilled in North America. The entire tree, including the most potent grubbed up roots, would be cut up and placed in stills, which would be heated by burning the wood already so distilled.

                                                      Sassafras still in Lexington Virginia                                                        

                                                             Small sassafras still 

The resulting distillate contained 80% Safrole, a yellowish or reddish-yellow liquid with a characteristic odor, and an aromatic taste.  The oil was placed in casks, and shipped to Richmond or Baltimore. Virginia, along with Pennsylvania and Maryland, were the principal producers of the oil.  Buckingham County was a major Virginia production area. In 1860, as much as 50,000 lbs. of sassafras oil are said to have entered the market from Baltimore alone.

In addition to its medicinal uses, and as a fragrance in perfumes, candles and soaps, it was always the primary flavoring ingredient in Root Beer.

Root Beer got its start as a tonic, but became a very popular beverage. It was produced for years in homes and sold in small quantities in shops and pharmacies. In 1876, Charles Hires was the first to commercially produce root beer in bottles. The ingredients varied, and tended toward the complex. A list of ingredients from a 1922 pamphlet about Hires Root Beer demonstrated the variety of its particular recipe:
Birch Bark, Chirreta, Dog Grass, Ginger, Hops, Northwest Juniper Berries, Licorice, Sarsaparilla, Sugar, Vanilla, Wintergreen, and Yerba Mate.

But in 1960, the Root Beer industry was unrooted. It was then that the FDA, citing evidence that the primary component in Sassafras oil, safrole, caused liver cancer in rats, banned it‘s consumption. Soon the food chemists had produced a substitute that was acceptable to the general public, if not the purist.  But the oil also helped produce the beer’s characteristic fine foam head, which proved difficult to fake.  It was finally discovered that yucca root, first used by the Navaho as a soapy shampoo, could help hold a head.

If you insist on authentic Sassafras taste in your beer, what are your options? Several chemical companies offer ‘Artificial Sassafras Oil”, but do not disclose what it is. 

Pappy's Sassafras Concentrate seems to offer the most authentic option. Pappy’s web site promises that it is “still brewed the old fashion way from sassafras root bark.  Pappy's Sassafras Tea is also very healthy for you as it is Safrole Free.”  They don’t explain how they can brew sassafras bark, and then remove the essential Safole oil with its characteristic aroma and taste, and still taste and smell like sassafras.  Could it be that in reality the addition of the “natural flavors” coyly noted in Root Beer extracts are actually imitating Safrole?

For the truly daring, there is a solution.  An expedition to a local health food store revealed authentic dried Sassafras root, though it was found in the medicinal herb section.  The container had pasted to its back a gentle warning: “Do not use frequently.”

I approached Oilville at 55mph on Rt. 250, leaving behind Short Pump, which was metastasizing its store fronts into the Henrico County farmland. . Oilville has one restaurant, one service station, a small strip mall that is for sale or lease, and a single stoplight, kept company by a Sheets. It does have its own post office, however.  You don’t even have to slow down as you traverse its one mile length, unless you catch the light, which invites you to get quickly back on the interstate paralleling Rt. 250. And other than the identifying road signs on the east and west approach, and at the post office, there is nothing to indicate that you are in Oilville, the site of a Sassafras production facility so important to the area, that in the past they changed the town’s name to commemorate it. No historical sign, no plaque, nothing. Even the Web was mostly unhelpful, and even worse, wrong.  The only mention is on Epodunk’s Oilville entry: “The community was named for a sassafras oil press.” There is no such thing as a sassafras oil press.

To try to learn more, I drive to the relative bustle of Goochland Courthouse, the location of the Goochland County Historical Society.  Sprawling and sparsely occupied, Goochland’s County seat sits at the intersection of Rt. 522 and Rt. 6, perched on a plateau just above the James River. 

The small Historical Society museum is worth a visit.  The helpful staff there were able to only find a few photographs, and one reference to the sassafras factory. In the Goochland County Historical Society Magazine Vol.26 from 1994, Wendell Watkins reminisces about his childhood in an article titled The Oilville Mill.  He recalls that local legend had it that Oilville was an important stage coach stop on Three Chopt Road, known then as Horsepen Mills.  He said that when a sassafras oil mill was set up there, it then became known as Oilville. He recalled “as a very small boy, I remember the sassafras logs laying about the woods and the holes where the stumps had been dug out.  They used the stumps and roots only for distilling the oil.”  He noted that “On the east side of the creek, papa owned the store, the mill and a sawmill…”   Given Mr. Watkins birth date of 1897, this would place the sassafras plant there in the early 1900’s. All of Mr. Watkins other references to “mill” in his memoirs appear to refer to his father’s flour mill.  However, his description of the location of the mill was key to locating the site of the oil extraction.

Modern sassafras oil extraction continues, primarily Brazilian sassafras oil, obtained from the trunk wood of Ocotea pretiosa (misnamed Brazilian sassafras or American cinnamon), and Chinese sassafras oil from Cinnamomum camphora (Camphor Tree), though other natural sources exist.  The oil is then converted primarily into two legal chemicals: heliotropin, which is used as a fragrance and flavoring agent, and piperonal butoxide (PBO), a synergistic ingredient of pyrethroid insecticides.

However, it is in dance clubs and raves that the demand for an illegal hallucinogenic party drug creates the potential for deforestation in Cambodia.  Sassafras oil is the primary precursor in the illegal synthesis of MDMA, or Ecstasy. In 2009 Fauna & Flora International, a group dedicated to conserve threatened species and ecosystems worldwide, announced that they had helped destroy illegal sassafras oil factories in the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia.  The factories were distilling the oil from the “exceptionally rare Mreah Prew Pnom trees”, and “causing enormous damage to the surrounding forest ecosystem.”

It is, however, unclear how much of the illegal harvest actually is diverted to ecstasy production, as opposed to being sold for legitimate purposes.

Back in Virginia, I return to Oilville.  Armed with my trusty Virginia Gazetteer, with its topographic maps, and the clues from Mr. Watkins, I search Rt. 250, old Three Chopt Road, for a creek.  Horsepen Creek crosses Rt.250 just west of Oilville Road. I pull off on the south side of the road, and skirting the no trespassing signs, walk into the woods behind a crumbling service station.  Traces of an old, indistinct asphalt road disappear into the woods along the east side of the creek. It appears that in the past, the old Oilville road went by here. In the woods I find that the substantial mill dam remains, though breached long ago. This is clearly the site of the Oilville Mills, and according to Wendell Watkins description, the site of the Oilville Sassafras oil plant. 

                                                    Mill dam at Horsepen Creek

In the quiet, lonely glade, I look at gentle Horsepen Creek. Once, harnessed by the dam, it powered groaning machinery that turned a 2 ton granite millstone to skillfully grind, but not mash, the grain.  I imagine creaking, clattering horse drawn wagonloads of sassafras logs and stumps, grubbed up from all over the Piedmont, being delivered to the Sassafras oil plant here at Oilville, to be sawn, distilled, and the fragrant oil delivered to Richmond and Baltimore. But now, except for the dam ruins, absolutely nothing remains of the mill, the still and store. 

                                                         Grubbing sassafras roots

The written record is so sparse. And Wendell Watkins died in 1991. Before I walk out of the otherwise unrevealing woods, I spy a likely small sapling.  I pull it out of the ground and smell the bruised bark.  Sassafras! 

 

                                               Wick Hunt

Photo credits: Period photos from The Volatile Oils, by Eduard Gildemeister and Friedrich Hoffman, 1916. Accessed utilizing Google Books.

All others by Wick Hunt