The Elms Go Down

by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

WHY are there trees,” asks Walt Whitman, “I never walk under but large and melodious thoughts descend upon me?” The answer, any New Englander would tell him, is that those trees must have been elms. And not just any elms — not slippery elms, or rock elms, or English elms, or Dutch elms. But the elm, that needs no introduction (though it has several specific names, such as white or water elm), for it is the elm that met the Pilgrims at Plymouth, the elm of Boston Common, of Harvard Yard, of Little Women, of Whittier and Lowell and Holmes. And, not to be provincial about it, it is the college campus variety found from Bowdoin in Maine to Pomona in southern California.

Wherever the white elm grows, whether as a native tree or cultivated beyond its aboriginal range, it is fairly sure to constitute itself Chief Inhabitant for miles around. It must have done so centuries before Thoreau climbed Poplar Hill in an autumn dusk to pick out unseen homes of his neighbors (whom he declares so much less estimable than their trees) by the high domes of the “imbrowned” elms, and the “hundred smokes” of the village chimneys twirling peacefully up through their noble crowns. For, long before the white men came, elms were council trees for Indian tribes, later the meeting place for treaty-making between whites and reds, and then the favorite house site of the first settlers, who spared elms when they razed all other trees.

So an elm can scarcely grow to old age without collecting rich human associations around it. In this respect it has but two rivals in all the sylva of North America — the white oak of the Northern states and the live oak in the South. But a survey of all the historic trees of our country shows that among them elms outnumber each of these oaks nearly two to one. Summing up hundreds of accounts, I find that in almost all cases it is the tree that makes some man or some event remembered. If you want to be recalled for something that you do, you will be well advised to do it under an elm — a great elm, for such a tree outlives the generations of men; the burning issues of today are the ashes of tomorrow, but a noble elm is a verity that does not change with time. And though elms too are mortal, great ones are remembered as long after they are gone as are great men. “On this spot stood once an elm ” — so begins many a marker, many a sentence in a book of local history, as one would say “Here was born a man,” “Here died a king.”

This tree, so often a living monument, takes on several forms; there is what is called the oak form, with heavy, more or less horizontal branches, and there is a “weeping” form and a “feathered” form; but typically the white elm is vase-shaped. In this, the most beloved of all its outlines, the main trunk separates at fifteen to thirty feet above ground into several almost equal branches. At first these diverge slightly and gradually, but at a height of about fifty to seventy feet they begin to sweep boldly outward so that they form a great dome, on the periphery of which the branches arch and the branchlets droop. Thus a great old elm appears like a fountain of vegetation — the trunk as the primary jet gushing upward and forking as it rises, then the jets again forking, the forks spreading out and falling as if by gravity in a hundred branchlet streams that become a thousand streamlet twigs and a million drops of spattering foliage.

Copyright 1948, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston 16, Mass. All rights reserved.

So, because of its fundamental architectural form, this is the ideal street tree, for its branches meet across the road in a vaulted arch that, permits the passage of the highest vehicles. As a dooryard tree, it hangs above the roof like a blessing — clean of branches under the crown but shading the roof like a second air-chamber above it. On a campus a colonnade of elms is a living stoa, and the supreme natural architecture of elms can triumphantly harmonize the woeful incongruities of that curse of all our old colleges — mixture of styles: Georgian jumbled with Palladian, Greek Revival, post-office Romanesque, Christian Science Byzantine, Baptist Gothic, and something combining the features of the baths of Caracalla and the libraries of Carnegie.

The very way that the leaves hang accounts for the special quality of elm shade. A big old specimen will have about a million leaves, or an acre of leaf surface, and will cast a pool of shadow one hundred feet in diameter. But, though umbraculate in shape, an elm is fortunately not too perfect a parasol in function. The leaves hang more or less all in one plane on the bough, and they make a pattern roughly like a lattice. Hence the dappling of shadow and light that is full half the charm of many a fine old façade in Portsmouth and Portland, in Newburyport and Salem, on Pleasant Street in Marblehead and Brattle Street in Cambridge. Within an old room, the play of light and shade from elm leaves is like music without sound, a dance without dancers.

2

WHAT makes a first-class elm?” asked Holmes in The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table, and answered: “Why, size in the first place, chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim that title, according to my scale.” Holmes mentions only six first-class New England elms known to him; no, I will not save you trouble by naming them for you — you can read your Autocrat as well as I; nor does he speak of the elm of Cambridge Common under which, it is fondly told, George Washington took command of the Continental Army.

The Cambridge Elm, hard by Harvard Yard, blew down during my student years there, and before the souvenir hunters had carried it quite away its rings were counted by an acknowledged expert. Alas for legend, it was found that this particular tree would have been little more than a sapling at the time of the siege of Boston. So, if Washington really stood under it, that third day of July, 1775, he must have picked it just because it was so small and young; he must have wished to give it a good start in life, to endow it with a legacy entailing his illustrious name. For Washington is perhaps the only man who ever added stature to an elm.

Holmes makes no mention of Connecticut elms, yet there are no New England villages more beautifully shaded by this species than Fairfield and Litchfield, Woodstock and Windsor, Woodbury and Wethersfield. The Great Elm, at the lastnamed, is one hundred and two feet high, with a spread of branches about one hundred and fifty feet, forty-one feet about at breast height (the correct place for measuring the girth of an elm, by the way), and its age today should be one hundred and ninety years. The Whipping Post Elm at Litchfield was used as a place of chastisement as late as 1815; today no culprit’s arms could be tied around its doughty girth.

When Sarah Saltonstall came from New London to be the bride of David Buck of Wethersfield, she intended to bring, after an old Connecticut custom, a bridal tree to plant, but ice on the river prevented the transportation of any gift except herself. Next spring she encountered an Indian bearing an elm sapling in his hand, and alter a powwow in sign language, secured the elm in exchange for a quart of rum. I am less impressed with the fame and stature of Sarah’s elm than by the mystery of how a churchgoing lady would have a quart of rum about her!

True that these famous Connecticut elms were not so tall when the Autocrat was published in the first volume of the Atlantic Monthly in 1857. But it was beyond Holmes’s power to conceive that elms outside New England might grow bigger and older still, that God in His inscrutable wisdom had bestowed this noble vegetable upon New Yorkers, Philadelphians, Washingtonians, Ohioans, Iowans, Omahas, Kansans, Kiowas, Kickapoos, and other people best lumped as something lost behind the Berkshires. The brutal fact is that the Markham Elm at Avon, New York, is said to be almost fifty feet in girth and about six hundred and fifty-four years old, which leaves the New England elms rather in the shade! Nor are all the historic elms found east of the Hudson; monarch among them was the Penn Treaty Elm that stood at Shackamaxon; here it was that William Penn made what was probably the only absolutely upright treaty ever offered the red man, certainly the only one scrupulously honored on both sides for as long as fifty years. This elm blew down in a storm on March 3, 1810, but scions and grandscions of this monument to integrity are scattered all over Penn’s Woods.

George Washington’s diary shows that he was constantly searching the bottom lands along the Potomac for wild elms to transplant to the grounds of “Mount Vernon.” Today four of those set out by his hand still stand, the largest of them on the Bowling Green. But more venerable still is the elm that young Mr. Washington, the surveyor, set out as the merest switch of a sapling at what is now Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, to mark the southern boundary of the land grant of Lord Fairfax. Elms and George Washington came naturally together throughout his life—at Valley Forge, at Brandywine, in the churchyard at Alexandria where he worshiped, in the streets of Fredericksburg where he grew up.

There are so many elms in Lincoln’s life, it would be impossible to speak of them all even by name only — the elm above his mother’s grave in Indiana, the elms on the White House lawn, that must have known his sorrows, and best of all, I think, the Lincoln memorial tree at Atchison, Kansas, where the vast crowd that had gathered to hear him, and could not be accommodated inside the little church, sat under the shade while Lincoln spoke by the open window.

The great elm of Boonesborough, in Kentucky, is gone now — indeed Boonesborough itself is nothing today but a cornfield, a patch of wood, and a lovely bit of stream. So wondrous was this tree they called it “the divine elm”; it stood at the heart of this ghostliest of ghost towns, with a turf of wild white clover making a carpet beneath it right to the mighty roots. On that sward gathered on the 23rd of May, 1775, the first legislature of Kentucky. See them there — Harrod of Harrodsburg, in his coonskin cap, cradling his long rifle, and Richard Henderson in his scarlet coat and powdered wig, Squire Boone and Dan Boone and Calloway, the old fox — heroes of our Homeric days, who were founding a new state, in the American way. Transylvania they called it then — Kentucky, the Great Meadow, “beyond the woods.”

In Missouri still stands the Justice Tree, an elm where the aged Boone, as syndic of the Femme Osage district, dispensed the law to his consenting neighbors. At Le Claire, Iowa, the citizens still honor and protect The Green Tree, an elm of enormous spread which was the “green hotel” of travelers and rivermen in the days of Mark Twain’s boyhood. They say that Buffalo Bill played beneath this tree when he was a child. More importantly, The Green Tree is still the natural meeting place for all the folk of this old river town. When a railroad obtained a right-of-way through Le Claire, along the river bank, its citizens stoutly refused to let it pass unless it routed its way around The Green Tree.

There are many Le Claires scattered over this country — little towns that worship big elms; Kearney, Nebraska, and Grand Detour, Illinois, are two green in my memory, and there are a thousand more that I may never have heard of, yet their names would come to your lips. All of them but prove the elm does not belong to New England alone, not even to the national capital, although Washington is the most elm-planted of all our cities; it belongs to the whole country, even far beyond its natural range, wherever it can be grown.

3

THE elm is more securely rooted in the love and traditions of the American people than any other tree, native or exotic. So it is with alarm that people are realizing that our elms are dying by the thousands, of a new epidemic. True that the elm has many insect pests and fungus diseases, but most have been native to our tree, which had thus built up an immunity to them. What happens when a disease from some foreign tree reaches this country and is spread by man’s all too efficient methods of transportation, we saw when the chestnut blight entered our country on Chinese chestnuts and exterminated our noble native species with appalling swiftness.

Warned by that experience, our experts were watching anxiously for the first appearance here of a fungus called Graphium ulmi that was ravaging the elms which helped to hold the dykes of Holland and, no respecter even of majesty, had attacked the magnificent row of English elms which line the long approach to Windsor Castle. Our quarantine authorities thought they had every avenue of entry blocked against the Dutch elm disease. Yet it broke out in the heart of the country, in Ohio in 1930. Converging at once upon the local outbreak, sanitary forces exterminated it; but in 1933 three thousand eight hundred diseased elms were found in New Jersey and twenty-three in Connecticut across the Hudson. Every year brought more alarming reports of spreading malady, and it was evident that, carefully though all living elm stock was inspected at the ports of entry, Graphium ulmi, all unseen, was some way coming over here in lethal doses.

The locus of infection was found at last in logs of English elm which we imported wholesale for the manufacture of elm veneer. For some of the European elms produce abnormal lumpy growths on the trunk, called burls, which when sliced by the veneer knives reveal fancy figures that unhappily pleased the public taste here. These logs were swarming with elm bark beetles, the Scolytus multistriatus, who, disgustingly healthy himself, is the carrier of the disease. And since once it has gained entry within an elm, nothing can be done save to fell and burn the tree, the war for the elms has concentrated attack on the bark beetle. So far, DDT is the most powerful weapon in our armory, but the Dutch Elm Disease Project of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is constantly experimenting with further chemical warfare.

The private citizen can best help by recognizing suspicious symptoms. If the elm bark beetle is present, you may find in the tree’s crotches a lot of rust-colored frass, and also “shotgun holes” made where the larvae have emerged through the bark. Under the bark will be seen the characteristic “engraving” of centipede-like form — the broad galleries of the larvae. The presence of the fungus may be known by the shepherd’s-crook curvature of the twigs, by the yellowing and falling of foliage even in spring and early summer, and in late summer and winter by the persistence of dead leaves at the tips of the branches. If you cut open the twig of an elm diseased with this fungus, a cross section will show brown streaks and discolored rings in the wood. Since all these symptoms are imitated by other maladies of the elm, the layman should send doubtful specimens to his State Department of Agriculture for expert identification.

For the outlook at present is more alarming than it was when the fight began. The Dutch elm disease has been moving up the Connecticut valley and is making its most serious progress in New England with an evil rapidity. In Massachusetts the first stricken elm was spotted in 1941, far to the west in Berkshire County. Today over thirteen hundred elms have fallen to the enemy, and many more are doubtless infected. The little village of Sheffield alone lost ninety-eight trees, and since it is the ancient trees with old and weak limbs that yield most helplessly to the bark beetle, this was a loss of venerable beauty. Quincy lost a hundred and three elms last year. Now Salem has been invaded with a threat to the centenarians whose branches lock above Chestnut Street. Williamstown, with its famous quadruple row of elms the length of Main Street, is up in arms. Williams students hunted out the dead and dying trees, property owners combed their woodpiles for elm wood that might have been affected, and a trained investigator led the whole determined defense. The credit for the clean trees in Williamstown goes directly to the strenuous efforts of an energetic community.

New Haven is, too, aroused to the fight, for she is one of the great elm cities of New England. Before the blight beetle arrived in 1945, there were six thousand shade elms within the city. Today more than a thousand of them are doomed, including some of the magnificent old giants along Whitney Avenue. Those deep staunch roots take labor and money — perhaps as much as two hundred dollars a tree — to bring out of the earth, and with them is torn out a green peace, a calm faith, that no coin can buy. The sight of men working on those great decapitated trunks is a harsh reminder of what might happen straight through New England.

The only significant victory so far won is in northeastern New Jersey and is due entirely to the intensity of the effort expended upon searching out diseased trees not only in cultivation but in the wild. The lesson for other states is obvious. And the problem has become chiefly the states’. For the Congress, in May, 1947, revoked the Federal Dutch Elm Disease Quarantine and threw the fight back to them. They are not incapable of waging it —provided that the taxpayers grant them the funds.

During the war, when manpower and money had to be diverted to deeper channels, the elm disease, like a neglected forest fire, got out of bounds. Since the war, there has followed a clamor for economy in government, and the first to fall under the legislator’s axe are too often the scientists, the foresters, the research projects. So, if the elms above your house, on the streets of your town, mean much to you, speak for them. Write to your state senator and your state congressman telling them that you want adequate funds appropriated for stamping out the Dutch elm disease, and that you are willing to see your taxes go up enough to bear your share in this fight. Only so can you strike a blow against this creeping enemy, and I promise you that it will not be ineffective, for years of working for conservation have taught me that, though petitions and resolutions are feeble, a letter, in your own words, counts with the lawmakers. The chestnuts are gone; the elms are going, but it is not too late to fight for them. We shall not grow again a tree so noble, or so deeply rooted in a noble past.