Felling the big elm, which must have been some fifty years old when the British marched into town.

January 21.

January 21, 2016

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm at 10 A. M., went to dinner at 12, and got through at 2.30 P. M. They used a block and tackle with five falls, fastened to the base of a button wood, and drawn by a horse, to pull it over the right way; so it fell without harm down the road. One said he pulled twenty turns. 

I measured it at 3 P. M., just after the top had been cut off. It was 15 feet to the first crotch. At 75 feet, the most upright and probably highest limb was cut off, and measured 27 inches in circumference. As near as I could tell from the twigs on the snow, and what the choppers said who had just removed the top, it was about 108 feet high. 

At 15 feet from the stump, it divided into two parts, about an equal size. One was decayed and broken in the fall, being undermost, the other (which also proved hollow) at its origin was 11' 4" in circumference. (The whole tree directly beneath this crotch was 9' 3"round.) 

This same limb branched again at 36' 8" from the stump, and there measured, just beneath the crotch, 14' 10" in circumference. At the ground the stump measured 8' 4" one way, 8' 3" another, 7' 6" another. 

It was solid quite through at butt (excepting 3 inches in middle), though some what decayed within, and I could count pretty well 105 rings, not including the hollow.  

There was a currant bush opposite the first crotch, in a large hole at that height, where probably a limb once broke off (making three there), and also a great many stones bigger than a hen’s egg, probably cast in by the boys. There was also part of an old brick with some clay, thirty or forty years within the tree at the stump, completely overgrown and cut through by the axe. 

I judged that there were at least seven cords then in the road, supposing one main limb sound, and Davis thought that the pile in the yard, from the limbs taken off last week, contained four more. 

He said that there were some flying squirrels within and upon it when they were taking off the limbs. There was scarcely any hollowness to be discovered.

It had grown very rapidly the first fifty years or so. You could see where there had once been deep clefts between different portions of the trunk at the stump, but the tree had afterward united and overgrown them, leaving some bark within the wood. 

In some places the trunk as it lay on the ground (though flatwise) was as high as a man’s head. 

This tree stood directly under the hill, which is some sixty feet high, the old burying hill continued, south of where the flagstaff was planted when the British marched into town. This tree must have been some fifty years old and quite sizable then. 

White, when taking off the limbs, said that he could see all over Sleepy Hollow, beyond the hill. There were several great wens on the trunk, a foot in diameter and nearly as much in height. 

The tree was so sound I think it might have lived fifty years longer; but Mrs. Davis said that she would not like to spend another such a week as the last before it was cut down. They heard it creak in the storm. One of the great limbs which reached over the house was cracked. The two main limbs proved hollow.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, January 21, 1856

Four men, cutting at once, began to fell the big elm. See January 19, 1856 ("Measure again the great elm in front of Charles Davis’s on the Boston road, which he is having cut down. . . .At the smallest place between the ground and the limbs, seven feet from the ground, it is fifteen feet and two inches in circumference; at one foot from the ground on the lowest side, twenty-three feet and nine inches."); January 22, 1856 ("Most were not aware of the size of the great elm till it was cut down. . . . I have attended the felling and, so to speak, the funeral of this old citizen of the town."); January 26, 1856 ("It was one hundred and thirty-two years old, or came up in the year 1724, just before Lovewell’s Fight.")