David Gannon is one of many scholars on Florida to document the history of the turpentine camps:

Deep in the vast pine forests the turpentine camps subjected thousands of blacks to a more subtle violence, punctuated by beatings and killings, that carried the technical name peonage, a system more plainly described as forced labor. Although the state had outlawed convict leasing, another legistlative act, in 1919, authorized turpentine operaters to hold nonconvict workers for debt. Under this law an operator recruited black workers, and the company provided them transportation to the work site, placing them in debt for that service. The workers' annual bill for grits, pork, calico, and shoes always added up to more than his wages. The system, ensuring as it did that the blacks would never be out of debt, made quitting almost impossible. 'You is born into the teppentine,' one worker said, 'Ain't nothing you go into. Something you get out of.' White riders wielding pistols and leather whips kept the blacks at constant work. The squalid forced labor and the overseers' justice in these pine pitch gulags would continue to stain the heart of Florida through the following decade, and in Alachua County until as late as 1949. (Gannon Florida:A Short History87-88)