Text only Version of the Online Writing Lab
St. Louis Community College - Meramec
Guided Practice - Choose the Best Summary
Read the text "Pines". You might want to print this page. Go to the next page after you have finished reading this text. Notice that each sentence is numbered to help you refer to them later on.
1 Pine trees appear across the United States from Maine to Florida and from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. 2 From the earliest days of white settlement, the pine caught the American imagination and its sense of practicality. 3 The settlers’ definition of pine included more than pines: it was a general name for hemlock, fir, spruce, and cypress. 4 Though the settlers came from a land bearing fewer than one hundred varieties of forest trees to one with almost one thousand, they, nevertheless, found uses for every type of pine.
5 In fact, without the pine, early settlements might have been delayed. 6 When Captain John Smith and his men sailed from England for Virginia in December, 1606, they planned to find, not pine trees, but gold. 7 Captain Smith wrote in his General Historie of Virginia that there was “no talke, no hope, nor worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold” (Morris 50). 8 Unfortunately, the adventurers found no gold and faced the prospect of being recalled to England when they could not repay their debts to the Virginia Company, which wanted quick profits. 9 In desperation, they looked for something valuable, and they found the pines. 10 Working furiously, they downed trees, cut them into clapboards and wainscoting, tapped trunks for turpentine and pitch, burned trees for potash and collected resin for waterproofing their ships. 11 Despite the fact pines towered over all other trees in the forests and were hard to cut down, they were extremely valuable, providing fuel, turpentine, resin, tar, paints, lampblack, tanbark, and pitch.
12 Pine trees also provided the means for one of the housewife’s chief occupations: keeping her family and her surroundings clean. 13 Women scrubbed with lye soap made from wood ashes, boiled the wash water over wood fires, swept the floors with brooms made from pine branches. 14 Other women used bowls, spoons, and utensils carved from wood, rigged beds with pine slats and entertained children with wooden toys.
15 In fact, women settlers everywhere, town and farm, East and West, recognized the abiding emotional comfort provided by pine trees. 16 They knew the pines guarded the home both physically and psychologically. 17 Surrounded by pine trees, they could withstand winter winds and loneliness. 18 Certainly, the pines might have reminded them of their resourcefulness in the New World and of their hope for the future.
Suellen Meyer, “Quilts,” The Quilt Digest, ed. Michael Kile (San Francisco: The Quilt Digest, 1986) 7-14.