In Awe of Big Trees
by Monette Bebow-Reinhard Take a walk in the woods—back, back in time, when the trees grew so tall that a myth of a gigantic lumberman was born. Imagine lumbermen finding trees so big that they conjured stories around the campfire about a man they called Paul Bunyan, who could fell them with one swoop of his axe, with an ox so big that whole forests of trees this size could be carted away in a single day. Trees always held an aura of mystery for me, having developed my childhood imagination in the forests of my backyard, so I was not surprised to discover the awe that people had when I showed them this tree photo from the North Woods Journal in Figure 1. They all said, “No way! Not around here!” So I went into the woods with the need to uncover ancient life—could Wisconsin trees have once gotten this big? Could they get this big again, if we let them? Mary Hamilton Burns and her publisher, Dave Engel, noted that this photo came from the collection of Edward Foster, son of George Foster, who operated a sawmill in Mellen, Wisconsin, and tentatively identified the trees as Wisconsin Eastern white pine. This is the only type of tree in the eastern half of the U.S. that could have gotten this big. Engel later asserted that they were Michigan trees, although Mary Burns, whose grandfather, Charles Hamilton, wrote the journal that she published, said the photo collection was labeled “Wisconsin.” There was not a specific label on this specific photo in that collection owned by Edward Foster. I wanted to establish this big tree potential here in Wisconsin. But I could have been exploring anywhere Eastern USA. Maybe, now that I think back to the start of this quest, I only wanted to play in the woods again. |
Let the photo absorb you and you might see what I see. You’ll see Paul Bunyan, the great lumberjack of legend, hauling these trees away with his big blue ox. Blue? Well, it is a myth, after all. You might wonder if those puny men in that photo, who appear intimidated here, ever found the courage to take a swing at one of these ancient trees, in this forest where neither sun nor snow could reach the ground. But someone did, because these trees no longer stand, in a place where once nothing grew but them.
Notice that there are no branches visible, just straight upward shots of solid bark, as wide at the base as the man’s height. These loggers captured for themselves a record in this photograph of what was before they began to erase it from existence. They preceded civilization in the wilderness to carve farmland out of forest and to make a fortune with lumber. One tree equaled forty houses, or so the legend goes. They captured this moment to show their heroism, perhaps.
But this photo made me feel cheated. I wanted to find a forest today that would remind me of the trees I loved as a child, trees that towered over me, filling me with the magical mysteriousness of Nature with a capital “N.” In back of my house was a short forest of trees, with copse and burrows, filled with fairies to find and horses to ride. Mom said I’d come home covered in ticks, but I never noticed, my head filled with adventures of the day.
I’m also a student of history, and having completed Arndt’s sawmill research in Pensaukee, Wisconsin, to get it on the National Historic Site, realized that the history of trees deserves recognition, too. I began the research hoping to find a tree this big still living, or at least one that was heartily on its way.
But with all the logging before the early 1900s, was this a quest into the solitude of imagination?
*
Errol Jahnke, age 79, was third generation Pensaukean. Pensaukee on the western shore of the bay of Green Bay was home in 1827 to Arndt’s Sawmill, the first documented, first commercial and first sustained sawmill west of the Great Lakes. Pensaukee’s destiny as a sawmill camp, and then as a company logging, town opened a path through the forest for a destructive tornado on July 7, 1877 that devastated the town and all but destroyed its lumber enterprise. Errol’s family didn’t come to the area until after the tornado, but he played on the big pine tree stumps, forlorn traces of a logger’s saw, and remembered noting them as being at least six feet in diameter when he got older. “Not possible to find them anymore,” he told me, with the air of guardian to a great secret.
He agreed that the trees in Figure 1, the bark and their size, meant they could only be the Eastern white pine. He was a rare folk who knew the age of the Eastern White growing on his property so that vital statistics could be obtained—128 years old, 89 feet tall, with a 29-inch diameter and a 93-inch circumference. And the stump he saw as a boy had a diameter of 72 inches. That’s nearly three times the size of the one in his yard.
His tree, growing solo, developed more lower branches; Eastern whites that grow in a stand, i.e. a group, do not develop lower branches and shoot up faster, all reaching for sunlight. But even as puny as it was here, Errol’s tree engulfed his old house. And Errol was a rare breed—he told us he would let the family house collapse before he would chop down that tree. Was that tree the reason he remained a bachelor? We’ll never know.
Book research uncovered tree experts who verified that the Eastern white pine, the biggest tree east of the Mississippi, can live to be over 500 years old and reach over 250 feet tall. A 84-inch diameter had been recorded at Brule River in a pine only a little over 300 years old, as noted in an edition of Wisconsin Famous and Historic Trees back in 2000. Errol’s wouldn’t get that tall because it wasn’t growing in a stand. Another source noted that trees really don’t have a lifespan—they grow until they die.
I then tracked down the two biggest Eastern whites in Wisconsin.
At the Flambeau River State Forest region in northern Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) proclaimed their largest pine dead. The foresters planned to cut it down in a public ceremony. The tree stood 130 feet tall and was considered to be over 300 years old. It was no longer near its full height because branches had been tumbling to the ground, making it a safety hazard in this public recreation area. They told me to get there before the ceremony to measure the diameter at breast height (dbh) before its felling reduced it to another forlorn stump.
About a week before the ceremony, some local Chippewa natives complained that cutting it down would destroy the tree’s spirituality, so the ceremony was canceled. Why did the Chippewa want it saved? Native legend says that these great pines were so tall that their legendary hero Winnebozho was able to escape the anger of the water spirits who tried to drown him. Let it fall on its own, they insisted.
But in the middle of the night, right after the ceremony was cancelled and before I could get there, the tree was mysteriously cut down. Who would do such a thing? A protestor of the protest? This mystery was never solved.
Notice that there are no branches visible, just straight upward shots of solid bark, as wide at the base as the man’s height. These loggers captured for themselves a record in this photograph of what was before they began to erase it from existence. They preceded civilization in the wilderness to carve farmland out of forest and to make a fortune with lumber. One tree equaled forty houses, or so the legend goes. They captured this moment to show their heroism, perhaps.
But this photo made me feel cheated. I wanted to find a forest today that would remind me of the trees I loved as a child, trees that towered over me, filling me with the magical mysteriousness of Nature with a capital “N.” In back of my house was a short forest of trees, with copse and burrows, filled with fairies to find and horses to ride. Mom said I’d come home covered in ticks, but I never noticed, my head filled with adventures of the day.
I’m also a student of history, and having completed Arndt’s sawmill research in Pensaukee, Wisconsin, to get it on the National Historic Site, realized that the history of trees deserves recognition, too. I began the research hoping to find a tree this big still living, or at least one that was heartily on its way.
But with all the logging before the early 1900s, was this a quest into the solitude of imagination?
*
Errol Jahnke, age 79, was third generation Pensaukean. Pensaukee on the western shore of the bay of Green Bay was home in 1827 to Arndt’s Sawmill, the first documented, first commercial and first sustained sawmill west of the Great Lakes. Pensaukee’s destiny as a sawmill camp, and then as a company logging, town opened a path through the forest for a destructive tornado on July 7, 1877 that devastated the town and all but destroyed its lumber enterprise. Errol’s family didn’t come to the area until after the tornado, but he played on the big pine tree stumps, forlorn traces of a logger’s saw, and remembered noting them as being at least six feet in diameter when he got older. “Not possible to find them anymore,” he told me, with the air of guardian to a great secret.
He agreed that the trees in Figure 1, the bark and their size, meant they could only be the Eastern white pine. He was a rare folk who knew the age of the Eastern White growing on his property so that vital statistics could be obtained—128 years old, 89 feet tall, with a 29-inch diameter and a 93-inch circumference. And the stump he saw as a boy had a diameter of 72 inches. That’s nearly three times the size of the one in his yard.
His tree, growing solo, developed more lower branches; Eastern whites that grow in a stand, i.e. a group, do not develop lower branches and shoot up faster, all reaching for sunlight. But even as puny as it was here, Errol’s tree engulfed his old house. And Errol was a rare breed—he told us he would let the family house collapse before he would chop down that tree. Was that tree the reason he remained a bachelor? We’ll never know.
Book research uncovered tree experts who verified that the Eastern white pine, the biggest tree east of the Mississippi, can live to be over 500 years old and reach over 250 feet tall. A 84-inch diameter had been recorded at Brule River in a pine only a little over 300 years old, as noted in an edition of Wisconsin Famous and Historic Trees back in 2000. Errol’s wouldn’t get that tall because it wasn’t growing in a stand. Another source noted that trees really don’t have a lifespan—they grow until they die.
I then tracked down the two biggest Eastern whites in Wisconsin.
At the Flambeau River State Forest region in northern Wisconsin, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR) proclaimed their largest pine dead. The foresters planned to cut it down in a public ceremony. The tree stood 130 feet tall and was considered to be over 300 years old. It was no longer near its full height because branches had been tumbling to the ground, making it a safety hazard in this public recreation area. They told me to get there before the ceremony to measure the diameter at breast height (dbh) before its felling reduced it to another forlorn stump.
About a week before the ceremony, some local Chippewa natives complained that cutting it down would destroy the tree’s spirituality, so the ceremony was canceled. Why did the Chippewa want it saved? Native legend says that these great pines were so tall that their legendary hero Winnebozho was able to escape the anger of the water spirits who tried to drown him. Let it fall on its own, they insisted.
But in the middle of the night, right after the ceremony was cancelled and before I could get there, the tree was mysteriously cut down. Who would do such a thing? A protestor of the protest? This mystery was never solved.
I arrived at the site of the vandalism, measured and photographed the forlorn stump, and chatted with forester Dave Olson. He shook his head at the Burns mystery photo and denied any such potential in the Eastern white pine. The stump of the Flambeau Pine measured 60 inches in diameter, only 12 inches less than the biggest stumps that Jahnke remembered seeing, and 32 inches more than the tree in his yard.
This pine would have been called a “secondary virgin”—not part of an ancient forest, but one of the young trees ignored when the loggers first went through. Secondary virgins can also be found in areas where the cost to access them was not worth the cost to sell them. These lone secondary virgins continued to grow, and now tower over the rest of the forest canopy. This makes secondary virgin Eastern white pines very effective lightning rods; it was lightning that killed the Flambeau tree. Trees are indistinct when they all blend together to form a forest. Above the forest is the canopy where the treetops kiss the skyline. This is the passionate reaching of tree to grab the nourishment of sun and vapor, with some trees more aggressive than others. But every now and then a tree pokes its elegantly needled bushy face high above all of them, like the tree in Figure 3. This is an Eastern white pine. This tree, a single face to the sun, stands waiting, challenging a bolt of lightning to come along and attempt to shorten its mighty life. Secondary virgins, after escaping the saw of the heavy lumbering years, were further protected by the sustained harvest, a notion set into motion by Teddy Roosevelt to cut selectively with an eye on maintaining these resources for future use. The Eastern white pine was never chosen as a tree to plant and selectively harvest, like the jack, Norway, or red pine, because it doesn’t grow quickly enough for U.S. booming enterprises. The McArthur Pine was the biggest living pine found in this Wisconsin exploration; it was 213 inches in circumference and a diameter of 68 inches. This tree was still thriving when we met. Unlike the Flambeau, the McArthur had great green branches on its head and shoulders, growing taller each year even after lightning opened its bark to potential insect abuse. The base of the tree had split open, forming a cave for young adventurers. A year later I went back into that forest to see the McArthur Pine for the last time. Someone, or something, had started a fire in its open base. Nothing burned around the tree, and most of the tree itself did not burn. I had been told by forester Dave Olson that whoever cut the Flambeau tree down knew what they were doing. The same thing could be said about this fire. The tree was not as old as they had suspected; one forester had been excited to learn this and saddened that its potential had been cut short. Equally excited at finding what could be a tree soul mate, I showed him the mystery photo. He said the trees were sugar pines from California and I should forget about it. How could I forget about Wisconsin’s last known big pine? The McArthur stood over 148 feet tall, and I had measured it the year before at a dbh of 68 inches. No other big pines have emerged as the biggest in Wisconsin, and perhaps, in view of the fate of these two, if there is one, its location needs to remain a secret. |
*
Nature is clever. Ancient forests helped control forest fires. Look at those trees in Figure 1 again. Can you imagine a forest fire taking those down? They don’t burn at that size because their bark is like iron and fire just moves along the ground. The worst fires burn the tops of the trees, but when trees are this high the fire doesn’t reach them. Managed forests are the ones that burn the worst—and over-timbered forests leave a lot of debris that fuel a fire and give it intensity.
Trees do not hold the same mystery for me now. Why did I have to learn that trees could get much bigger but I’ll never see it in my lifetime? Why do I have to leave behind my innocent childhood where once trees were so strong that nothing could destroy them? Once upon a time they lived to their fullest potential and died of old age, satisfied that they had filled a part of the chain of life. Now we even deny what that potential is.
No, the Eastern white pine, even if left alone, can’t get this big anymore, or so I’m told The Eastern white is also very susceptible to air pollution and new kinds of diseases. The past is gone but with photos like these can never be forgotten. This Burns mystery photo fulfilled that longing to return to my childhood where trees seemed sacred, instead of living in today’s world where they are only resources to be harvested, cut down or vandalized.
Yes, it was the “spirit of the tree” that those Chippewa protestors tried to save—the spirit of the tree’s potential. And the child in me plans to die as she was born, with awe of Nature’s mystery in tact. I can do little more with this discovery of trees than acknowledge the sacredness of Nature and hope to pass it on.
Monette Bebow-Reinhard has authored five books including Felling of the Sons, Mystic Fire (Write Words Inc.), Adventures in Death & Romance: Vrykolakas Tales (Solstice Shadows), Dancing with Cannibals (co-authored, KDP Publishing ), and Grimm’s American Macabre (All Things That Matter Press); her new novel Legend of the Half-White Son is coming out this fall. History, spirit, and love of the natural world permeate everything Monette writes. She researched the Eastern white pine while doing the work to get the earliest sawmill west of the Great Lakes on the National Historic Register. See more at www.grimmsetc.com
Nature is clever. Ancient forests helped control forest fires. Look at those trees in Figure 1 again. Can you imagine a forest fire taking those down? They don’t burn at that size because their bark is like iron and fire just moves along the ground. The worst fires burn the tops of the trees, but when trees are this high the fire doesn’t reach them. Managed forests are the ones that burn the worst—and over-timbered forests leave a lot of debris that fuel a fire and give it intensity.
Trees do not hold the same mystery for me now. Why did I have to learn that trees could get much bigger but I’ll never see it in my lifetime? Why do I have to leave behind my innocent childhood where once trees were so strong that nothing could destroy them? Once upon a time they lived to their fullest potential and died of old age, satisfied that they had filled a part of the chain of life. Now we even deny what that potential is.
No, the Eastern white pine, even if left alone, can’t get this big anymore, or so I’m told The Eastern white is also very susceptible to air pollution and new kinds of diseases. The past is gone but with photos like these can never be forgotten. This Burns mystery photo fulfilled that longing to return to my childhood where trees seemed sacred, instead of living in today’s world where they are only resources to be harvested, cut down or vandalized.
Yes, it was the “spirit of the tree” that those Chippewa protestors tried to save—the spirit of the tree’s potential. And the child in me plans to die as she was born, with awe of Nature’s mystery in tact. I can do little more with this discovery of trees than acknowledge the sacredness of Nature and hope to pass it on.
Monette Bebow-Reinhard has authored five books including Felling of the Sons, Mystic Fire (Write Words Inc.), Adventures in Death & Romance: Vrykolakas Tales (Solstice Shadows), Dancing with Cannibals (co-authored, KDP Publishing ), and Grimm’s American Macabre (All Things That Matter Press); her new novel Legend of the Half-White Son is coming out this fall. History, spirit, and love of the natural world permeate everything Monette writes. She researched the Eastern white pine while doing the work to get the earliest sawmill west of the Great Lakes on the National Historic Register. See more at www.grimmsetc.com