When I was in elementary school, I read a series of books in a series known as the “I Was There” books. Each story placed a young person in a history-making event. Titles like I Was There: The Battle of Gettysburg, tell the tale from the angle of a child watching the battle. Have we not all wanted to be able to go back in history to see what really happened, maybe just to meet one of our own ancestors? There are living things that bore silent witness to great events of the past, and they still stand, silent witnesses, unable to tell us their story. Trees.

A friend sent me a link to an article the other day concerning the “witness tree” at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The huge honey locust witnessed the Battle of Gettysburg from an area on the Union right flank. The park rangers tell us that Union soldiers sat under the tree on Cemetery Hill during all three days of the battle and that it is about 150 feet from the platform upon which Abraham Lincoln delivered his Gettysburg Address. In the first week of August this year, the tree sustained about 80% damage in a storm, destruction it will not survive. Having seen the battle, the burials in the aftermath, and the speech of the President, the last living witness to the battle will die soon. He has stood as mute testimony to American heroism and death.

In Virginia Beach, Virginia stands “the Willoughby Oak” (Querqcus Virginiana) which is 500-600 years old and stands in a Navy housing complex near the Atlantic Ocean. The tree was there before the Protestant Reformation; it was a hundred years old when John Smith sailed the bay in the early days of the Jamestown Colony; it was hundreds of years old when a hurricane created the nearby “Willoughby spit”  that is crammed with houses and condos today.

In the American War for Independence, certain trees were designed “Liberty Trees” under which patriots gathered. They became symbols to the colonists of their liberty under law, but were viewed by the British as symbols of rebellion. A Tory cut down the Boston Liberty Tree in the Common in 1775. The last remaining Liberty Tree was the one in Maryland, a tulip poplar 96 feet high with a 60 foot spread and which was located on the grounds of Francis Scott Key’s alma mater, St. John’s College. In 1652 a peace treaty was signed under the tree between the colonists and Susquahannock Indians. Colonists met there before marching down to the Annapolis harbor to burn the tea-laden brig Peggy Stuart. French soldiers camped under it en route to the Battle of Yorktown in Virginia. The Maryland liberty Tree was 600 years old when it fell during Hurricane Floyd in October of 1999. (cf The Liberty Tree Project at www.providenceforum.org)

On the Brandywine Battlefield in Pennsylvania stands a magnificent 350 year old sycamore tree next to General Marquis de Lafayette’s Headquarters. It probably provided shade for the 19 year old French nobleman who had come to America to join the Continental Army of General George Washington. The young Frenchman was wounded in battle there but went on to become a legendary American hero. The sycamore tree is still healthy and imposing and the only known living thing to yet survive from the day of battle on September 11, 1777.

I am impressed with those great live symbols of time and enjoy pondering the scenes they silently witnessed in their day and today. My own mortality is a more sobering thought; I don’t have 350 years or 600 years to witness history in the making, nor do you. Our lives are but a vapor or as withering grass in the long ages of time. The trees will die too and the mark they leave with their passing compares not with the eternal soul of man whose earthly deeds do count for time and eternity.

Bill Potter