Imperial wars and Atlantic markets drove a boom in turpentine production in turn-of-the-eighteenth-century New England. English Colonists used techniques learned from Huguenot refugees to exploit local pines in a quest for profits that threatened woodlands and, in at least one dramatic example, led to violent competition between colonial neighbors.

In the eighteenth-century Connecticut Valley, colonists from all walks of life steadily protested the White Pines Acts. Their experience with popular resistance to imperial authority—sometimes passive, sometimes violent—prepared valley inhabitants to reject British authority during the Revolution, and it shaped an early American antipathy toward centralized governmental control of natural resources.