Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 8.djvu/381

 Historic Trees.

��547

��HISTORIC TREES.

By L. L. Dame.

��THE WASHINGTON ELM.

At the north end of the Common in Old Cambridge stands the famous Washington Elm, which has been oftener visited, measured, sketched, and written up for the press, than any other tree in America. It is of goodly

��to develop a tree larger than the Wash- ington Elm.

When Governor Winthrop and Lieutenant-Governor Dudley, in 1630, rode along the banks of the Charles in quest of a suitable site for the capital of their colony, it is barely possible the

���THE WASHINGTON ELM. [From D. Lothrop & Company's Young Folks' Life of Washington.]

��proportions, but, as far as girth of trunk and spread of branches constitute the claim upon our respect, there are many nobler specimens of the American elm in historic Middlesex.

Extravagant claims have been made with regard to its age, but it is extreme- ly improbable that any tree of this species has ever rounded out its third century. Under favorable conditions, the growth of the elm is very rapid, a single century sometimes sufficing

��great elm was in being. It would be a pleasant conceit to link the thrifty growth of the young sapling with the steady advancement of the new settle- ment, enshrining it as a sort of guardian genius of the place, the living witness of progress in Cambridge from the first feeble beginnings.

The life of the tree, however, proba- bly does not date farther back than the last quarter of the seventeenth century. In its early history there was nothing

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