The Trees at the Center of Our History

In their forward, the editors write, “Each essay focuses on an individual tree, a set of trees or defined forests to explore how trees have been creators and locations of meaning, specific challenges for sites and communities and objects of curation.”

While Branching Out is written primarily by historians intent on showing how trees should be more fully integrated into the work of making history, it is easily accessible for the nonacademic reader. In this way, the book makes good on its promise to offer a “public history,” an umbrella term deployed by the collection’s editors and authors for history that is relevant to the general public. Most of us, like Dempsey, already have some personal experience not just with trees, but of how they relate to public history, even if we haven’t thought of them that way.

Dempsey’s essay is a good example of this. His narrative expands dramatically from the personal to encompass the history of how the Mississippi Delta was transformed from a dense primordial forest traversed by Hernando de Soto in the 1500s into what Dempsey came to know: a flat mostly treeless landscape that had been cleared and drained by centuries of resource extraction and industrial expansion, from cotton empires underpinned by slave labor to intensive logging fueled by railroad companies and northern speculators. Old Hickory, the last remnant of old-growth forest, provides for Dempsey a symbolic parallel of natural and social refuge, “[A] close, confined space for local children to interact with nature on their own terms. It allowed for the formation of friendship bonds, and it served as a space for rebellion against dominant parental and societal conventions.”

Dempsey’s interest in the site may well have helped to preserve it—a vivid demonstration of the value of including trees in public history. In 2019, Dempsey began gathering local recollections, including an inquiry on a private Delta Facebook page, which received 432 responses—“a surprising and reassuring figure, given the lack of any previous formal study of the site,” he writes. In the process, he discovered that the city of Cleveland had purchased the agricultural land where Old Hickory sits and planned to build a soccer complex. He soon connected with the mayor of Cleveland and the owner who sold the land, both of whom share formative childhood memories of the site. The land’s owner then urged the city that Old Hickory “be preserved as a remnant of the original Delta.”

Chestnut stories

On the other extreme, Carolyn Barske Crawford’s essay, “ ‘The Most Useful Tree’: American Chestnut Stories And Species Restoration” is the most universal, given the vast extent and value of chestnuts in the American landscape, the impact of their almost total loss because of a blight introduced in the early 20th century, and the crucial role that organized storytelling has played in restoration efforts over the last 40 years. 

More than 4 billion American chestnut trees once stretched from southern Canada down to Mississippi and Alabama. “To those who lived in the eastern United States, especially Appalachia, the tree was invaluable,” Crawford writes. “It provided food for both people and animals and wood for cabins and fence posts. In cash-poor regions, the tree could even put some money in people’s pockets when they sold nuts to brokers to take to the cities of the Northeast.” The blight first recognized in New York in 1904 virtually destroyed the species by mid-century. Beyond its direct human impacts, Crawford writes, “This loss had enormous ecological impacts on the forests of the eastern United States and contributed to a decline in the population of many species of wildlife, including turkeys, bears, and squirrels.”

Restoration efforts began under the auspices of the American Chestnut Foundation (TACF), which began publishing a journal in 1985. “One of the most significant sections of the journal in its early years was the ‘Memories’ section, which documented ‘chestnut stories.’ ” Crawford writes. There is a lesson here. She writes, “[T]he work of TACF can, perhaps, provide a road map for other organizations to employ science, technology, public history practices, and memories to mobilize people to solve environmental challenges.”

Crawford’s essay and her subject matter provide a robust example of what a public history of trees can look like, encompassing a broad swath of American history, experienced and passed down at a very personal level, whose individual recognition and curation has played a vital role in creating the possibility of renewal. While the other essays are narrower in scope—nearly half focused on a single tree or small group of them—like trees themselves, the stories they convey are parts of a larger living system, the full extent of which has only begun to be explored.

Community tree stories

In addition to Dempsey and Crawford, four other essays make up “Part One: Trees, Place, and Communities.” These explore the evolution of state-level and regional forestry practices in Connecticut and Pennsylvania, mulberry tree cultivation by Mormon women in 19th century Utah, and the role of trees in the historical memory of two contrasting pairs of St. Louis neighborhoods.

Leah Glaser, one of the book’s co-editors, traces the history of Connecticut’s relationship to its trees in “When a Tree Falls: Listening to and Managing Connecticut’s Historic Landscape.” Glaser highlights key episodes of tree loss that are markers in the evolution of Connecticut’s political and cultural identity.

The earliest in Glaser’s history, on August 15, 1639—15 years after the settlement of the Plymouth Plantation—documents a devastating windstorm (later known as the Great Colonial Hurricane) that swept through the Massachusetts Bay Colony. According to William Bradford, the Puritan governor of Plymouth colony at the time, the storm uprooted “an inconceivable number of trees.” The subsequent food scarcity after the storm, which put Native people in competition with English settlers, conceivably helped lead to the Pequot War of 1636 to 1638, which lead to the near annihilation of the Pequot Tribe.

In Glaser’s telling, two trees played crucial roles in shaping Connecticut’s identity. “The red cedar tree remains sacred to tribal members located inland. One already long-standing Native ‘peace tree’ that survived the 1635 hurricane remains the central artifact of Connecticut’s own treasured creation story,” she writes. “As part of the colonization process, the English and their descendants appropriated this Native ‘peace tree,’ both literally and culturally into their own origin stories, claiming the land and its resources themselves.”

A second tree, the “Charter Oak” was the hiding place colonists used in 1686 to prevent King James II’s colonial governor from physically confiscating Connecticut’s colony charter granting them self-rule. Shortly after, James was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The oak—more than 800 years old at the time—became a symbol of colonial resistance and independence a century before the American Revolution.

These early tree stories reflect the central role trees would continue to play in Connecticut’s political and economic development. A particularly significant development was the influence of the early Connecticut Congregationalists’ ethic of the common good, which viewed “land use as a tool for economic and social equality.” This had a significant impact on Connecticut Progressive Era conservationists in the late 19th and early 20th century, whose ideas spread nationwide. Gifford Pinchot, born in Simsbury, Connecticut, co-founded and was the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service. He also helped found the Yale School of Forestry, which helped train the first generation of professional foresters in America. Another in the group, Rev. Horace Winslow, convened the first meeting of the Connecticut Forest Association in 1895, whose advocacy led the state to establish path-breaking forest management policies.

Liz Sargent’s essay, “The Trees of the South Mountain Cultural Landscape,” picks up on the theme of preservation, focusing on Pennsylvania’s South Mountain, “the northernmost outpost of the Blue Ridge Mountains.” The original forests were predominantly two types: “mixed oak” at lower elevations, primarily “northern red oak, chestnut oak, shagback hickory, red maple and tulip poplar,” and “northern hardwood” at higher elevations: “sugar maple, black cherry, aspen, birch, hemlock and ash.” Chestnuts were also widely present in the forests before the blight.

What stands out in Sargent’s survey of South Mountains history from colonial times to the present is the impact of the iron industry from 1764 to 1895, which resulted in massive deforestation to produce charcoal for smelting iron ore.  Then in the late 19th century, one man, Joseph Rothrock, spearheaded restoration efforts to save Pennsylvania’s forests through public education efforts, which attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania legislature.

Both a pioneering state forest and forest academy were established as a result, predating the establishment of the U.S. Forest Service in 1905. The history since has been rocky at times, but profoundly restorative. There have been setbacks—diseases afflicting elms, hemlock, ash, pine and chestnuts—and leaps forward, with the New Deal involvement of the Civilian Conservation Corps which constructed a key portion of the Appalachian Trail on South Mountain.

“As the cultural landscape of South Mountain was better understood and the forest regenerated,” Sargent writes, “a similar transformation of people’s attitudes about nature and stewardship of public resources arose.” While the forests there will never be what they once were, an ecosystem thousands of years in the making, Sargent concludes that “The evolution of South Mountain’s forests since the nineteenth century has been nothing short of astonishing.”

Meaning-making trees

A shift in focus toward meaning-making sets the stage for the book’s second part, “Trees as Symbols and Interpreted Objects,” which covers a presumed offshoot of George Washington’s legendary cherry tree at Ferry Farm in Virginia, the Fox Oaks in Flushing, New York, where the Quaker founder George Fox preached an historic outdoor sermon in 1672, and trees in Savannah, Georgia, Los Angeles and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, relating to North America’s troubled  racial past.

George Washington’s legendary cherry tree is not the subject Philip Levy’s essay, despite being its title. Rather, it’s the subtitle, “Ferry Farm’s Prunus Serotina and Historical Placemaking” names its true subject: the farm where Washington spent his childhood. Levy, the other co-editor of Branching Out, begins with a description of a photograph taken around 1917 of a man standing next to a tree said to be Washington’s original cherry tree. “Or perhaps it was a descendant of the original—either would be fine,” Levy wryly observes. In reality, the tree was less than 50 years old at the time.

Indeed, like the legend of Washington’s cherry tree—in which a six-year-old Washington, given a hatchet for his birthday by his father, confessed that he had used it to damage a cherry tree because he could not tell a lie—the whole site was more fabrication than preservation. Levy describes how it was recreated. Yet, true history remains: the history of how trees shape historical memory—more metaphorical than actual in this case. Even if the cherry tree story was fanciful, it represented an historical truth: Washington as a unifying figure of moral rectitude, in a period when political strife could have torn the young nation asunder.

There’s a similar fanciful rendering of historical truth in Alena Pirok’s essay, “Oaks of Ill Repute: Dark Tourism, Dissonant Heritage, and Savannah’s Hanging Trees.” The history of Savannah, Georgia, was certainly built in large part on racial subjugation through violence, first with slavery, then Jim Crow. But the violence of lynching—a very public spectacle—leaves almost no trace in actual historical records. “There is only one recorded lynching in the city of Savannah,” Pirok writes, and according to NAACP records, it took place outside of town. Yet, it is surely true that the city’s very existence is a product of historically related racial violence.

“Large mature trees” cover 44% of the city, Pirok writes, including “twenty-two eighteenth-century squares and numerous parks [that] are littered with twisty Spanish moss-covered oaks.” While “[m]any think fondly of the trees, some seeing them as deeply ‘intertwined’ with the relationship the city has with its past and its present,” the trees are routinely ignored in the city’s more than 100 public signs and plaques and in the narratives of most tour guides. However, “The guides who share the unmarked stories of whippings, lynchings and hangings look to the trees to orient their disturbing tales.”

Pirok discusses several of the city’s most notorious trees, highlighted by tour guides, starting with the 300-year-old Chandler Oak. It was saved from possible destruction in the 1980s, granted an easement “without any formal historical claim or cultural value,” yet today one tour company in particular touts it as Savannah’s hanging tree. Like Washington’s cherry tree, it represents an historical truth, even as its specific tale is invented.

There was no historical invention when it comes to another oak—only invention in how to keep history alive and move its lessons forward. “Living Memory in Los Angeles: Cornelius Johnson’s 1936 Olympic Oak in Art, History, and Preservation” is a conversation between public historian Alaina Scapicchio and artist Christian Kosmas Mayer revolving around an historic oak that became a subject for Mayer’s art, which involved propagating saplings from the tree that “were not just exhibits but narrators of living history.”

Cornelius Johnson was part of a coterie of African American athletes who attended the 1936 Olympics in Berlin as a direct challenge “to confront and disprove the Nazi propaganda of racial inferiority.” On the first day of competition, he won a gold medal, setting an Olympic record for the high jump. When Hitler refused to personally congratulate him as he had the first two gold medal-winners, the Olympic committee declared that Hitler could not pick and choose who to congratulate. So Hitler halted the practice at the cost of removing himself from the center of attention, thus giving Johnson a second victory.

In addition to their medals, all gold medalists were given potted oak trees, symbols of German identity long predating Germany’s political unification, much less the Nazis. Johnson’s acceptance of the tree was in no way an acceptance of intentions behind the gift. “He was proud and happy about his success, and the tree was a very personal memory he brought back and decided to take care of,” Mayer explains.

So he planted the tree in his family’s backyard, at the time at western edge of Los Angeles. Winning Olympic gold had no impact on Johnson’s subsequent life, and he died as a merchant seaman a decade later. But his parents kept the tree growing, although it was all but forgotten by the world until Mayer rediscovered it in 2014, instantly recognizing it as “the undisputed giant of the neighborhood.”

“The tree’s current significance, especially when connected to the story of an African American athlete, stands in stark opposition to what the Nazis aimed to symbolize during the Olympic Games,” Mayer reflects. To generate saplings for his exhibit in collaboration with the Huntington Botanical Garden, Mayer faced a choice between cloning Johnson’s tree, producing a genetically identical copy, or growing a hybrid from an acorn, “likely cross-pollinated with a native Californian oak.” Reflecting on the options in terms of purity versus mixed heritage, led him to opt for the hybrid, “embracing the complexity and richness it represents.”

Similar in spirit is Krista McCracken’s essay, “Pine Trees and the Legacy of the Shingwauk Site.” Residential schools throughout Canada and the United States were a key part of the colonization process in the 19th and 20th centuries. The schools’ mission was to assimilate indigenous children into Canadian and American society and erase their culture, language and identity, or, as U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt put it in 1892, “to kill the Indian, and save the man.” These schools are part of a legacy of trauma and violence, as evidenced by recent discoveries of mass unmarked graves at such residential schools, that is still felt today.

But Canada’s Shingwauk Residential School (Shingwauk is the Ojibway word for pine tree), which operated from 1874 to 1970, was intended to be different by its namesake, Ojibway Chief Shingwaukonse, who envisioned a school of cross-cultural education where Native cultural values could survive and help promote new ways of stewarding the resources of First Nation lands. He died in 1854, before it opened, and it didn’t turn out as he had planned, instead functioning with the same goals of assimilation as any other residential school. But the site is now home to Sault Ste. Marie campus of Algoma University, where his original vision lives, officially embodied in its charter from the province of Ontario.

“The symbolic importance of the deep roots and strength of the pine tree can be tied back to the two pine trees at the Shingwauk site. In the case of Shingwauk, the strength of the pine trees reflects the strength of healing and the survivor community,” which they were planted to commemorate, McCracken explains.

For forest-dwelling tribes, she writes, “The ideas of trees as markers and keepers of history is not something new. Since time immemorial, Indigenous people have had relationships with trees. These relationships have been cultural, spiritual and resource based.” Trees are even turned into signs by training them to grow in irregular directions to serve as directional signs.

More than that, “Trees have also been used by indigenous people to represent relationships and tell the history of communities,” she writes. “For example, the Great Tree of Peace, an eastern white pine tree is recognized as representing the unity and strength of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. The eastern white pine has clusters of five needles representing the five nations that came together to make up the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.”

While the Ojibway belong to a sister confederacy, they share much in common culturally. McCracken writes:

White pine is also noted for its strength and physical characteristics: As the tallest tree, the white pine also has strong roots, deep and widespread, rather than a single taproot. The deep, wide roots indicate stability, but they also became the carriers of the metaphor for the spreading of peace. White pines are also relatively fire resistant: they survive most surface fires due to their thick bark, branch-free trunks, and moderate the deep roots. Metaphorically, they survive the fires of war.

Although the Indigenous people who shared this culture have by far suffered the most damage from the extractive colonizing process, rural communities with people of all races have suffered from a similar carelessness and disregard, if not contempt for the values embodied in the white pines. Indeed, the ravages of climate change spread that suffering even further, to urban and suburban communities as well, all of which have their own trees to learn from as well. Recognizing and reflecting on these values, their loss and recovery is part of the cross-cultural educational process that Chief Shingwaukonse envisioned so long ago.

Recovering the meaning the white pines, and other trees had for past generations, and—like Mayer’s project with Charles Johnson’s oak—finding imaginative ways to add new meaning and propagate it forward can play a significant role in helping us to reorient the trajectory of the history we make going forward in a more respectful and sustainable direction for all. That’s the promise I found in reading Branching Out. I would invite you to do the same.

Paul RosenbergMore by this author →

Paul Rosenberg is a California-based writer. He's been a columnist for Al Jazeera English and Salon.com, and has written for dozens of daily and weekly papers including the Des Moines Register, the Dallas Morning News and the Christian Science Monitor. He is senior editor at Random Lengths News, an alternative biweekly based in San Pedro, California.