Lightning struck her for the final time on the night of March 9. The huge surge had followed some old wiring up the tree and continued on to split the bark to the top of the canopy. Several neighbors called us about it the next morning. The giant pine lived in the front yard of our old house at 204 Fairhope Avenue and had been a part of our lives for 34 years since the 1990s when we lived in the little cottage there.
I looked at the tree Sunday morning and on Monday called Arborist “A” (a tree cutter) to come look at it. He agreed that it was indeed a bad strike and that the tree had a less than 5% chance of survival. I set him up to take down the tree the following Wednesday. I wasn’t certain then it was a longleaf, and asked Dr. Lynn Yonge to take a look at it, as an amateur tree guy. He quickly confirmed that it was a longleaf and suggested that they are famous for surviving lightning strikes, and that we should give it a chance, as it might make it. I put Cutter “A” on hold and then contacted certified Arborist “B” (a tree saver) and got him to take a look at it. His report noted that beetles had already infiltrated the lightning wound and that a $300 annual treatment might prevent further infestation. He also shared images of the blue staining that happens to the lumber if the infestation continues. In further discussion, he allowed that he didn’t think it was likely that the tree would survive, and I also asked him for a quote to take the tree down.
My wife and I now had two simple choices before us: possibly saving the tree for another five or more years with annual treatments (with risks of falling limbs during that time) or saving the lumber, surrounding structures, and people now by taking it down soon. We chose the latter. Full disclosure: in our professional lives as architects, we are both tree huggers and fine wood lovers. It wasn’t a hard decision.
Sometime back around 1994, I had the opportunity to show the tree to Sam Dyson, who was then 87, and ask what he knew about it, and why there was a flat iron hook sticking out of the trunk about 9’ up. Sam’s parents were one of the early families of Fairhope. He didn’t hesitate to remember the tree. He used to hitch his horse to that iron when was younger, in the 1920s. He had no thoughts about why it was so high in the air.
A few years ago, Alan Samry sent the photo from 1922. In enlarging it, the “hitching iron” looks like it is already there. You can also see that the tree is one of the tallest in the neighborhood, even back then. A couple of hundred feet to the south, there is also another large pine that looks to be a first cousin of this one. It is still there today.
Fairhope was “cut-over” pine land when the settlers arrived. I have often wondered how this lonely tree survived the chance adjacency to the new Fairhope Avenue, its sidewalks, growth and utilities. A forester friend, Kris Bradley, has told me that the “longleaf gangs” had already harvested most of the old growth longleaf pine from the Fairhope area by the 1880s and 1890s, just before Fairhope was settled. For some reason, they passed on this tree.
The Wednesday the tree was cut, it took about five hours and two cranes for the four tree men to dismantle the ancient tree and grind the stump. They guessed it was about 95 feet tall. The trunk measured around 32 inches in diameter at breast height.
Once it was down, we all began the ritual of counting the rings, the poor man’s version of dendrochronology. A few of the old-growth rings were tight enough to require a magnifying glass. My best tally has the tree at around 175 years old, which means it had sprouted around 1850, survived the Civil War, the great late 19th century longleaf cutting, all of our hurricanes named and unnamed and all of Fairhope’s history to date. It was already around 50 years old when Fairhope was settled.
The tree had a big split at its crown, which probably indicates that it would have eventually fallen off in a large section in the next few years. The core also showed the beginnings of its rot.
We got five nice 8-foot sawlogs from the trunk, which might yield around 1,900 board feet or about 320 1” x 8” planks. I dissected the area of the trunk around the mystery hitching iron, and it looks like it might have been embedded in the tree around 1910 or so. The remaining mystery is how it ended up so twisted and curled within the tree trunk.
Sometime later this year, we will saw the logs into quarter-sawn slabs and air dry them slowly in our shed. In already dreaming about the furniture, countertops or paneling that can be made from this beautiful tree, I regularly remember some of the fine artistic furniture that has been made in Fairhope over the years from trees like this. Craftsmen like Dan Isherwood, Roy Hyde, Craig Sheldon, Louis Mayson Sr. and Jason Hafner have shown us the way through many of their iconic pieces. I hope this tree can add to that tradition.
Top to bottom Oxen at Fairhope Avenue. Photo courtesy Inge Family Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama // The pine tree, visible on Fairhope Avenue in 1922. Photo courtesy of the Fairhope Museum of History // The hitching iron, embedded in the tree around 1910. Photo by Summer Ennis Ansley.
Longleaf History
Longleaf pine forests once covered 90 million acres of the southern United States, focusing along the Atlantic and
Gulf Coasts.
Only about 5 million acres remain across the US today, up from a historical low of 3.2 million acres two decades ago according to The Nature Conservancy.
By some estimates, only twelve thousand acres of the remaining trees are “old growth” longleaf.
It is estimated that in 1630, longleaf and other pines, as well as a variety of hardwoods, covered some 29.5 million acres in Alabama.
The early settlers drained the forest for turpentine, logged it for building material and clear cut it for agriculture.
What are naval stores?
From the longleaf pine trees came products used in shipbuilding such as turpentine, rosin, tar and pitch. The gum-like resin of longleaf pines was called crude turpentine. The distillation of crude turpentine made spirits of turpentine, which was used as lamp oil and in the manufacturing of medicines, paints and rubber goods. A residue from the distilling process was rosin, which was used to reduce the harshness of lye soap. Smelting pine logs made tar and pitch. Tar was used to protect the rope rigging of sailing ships, to grease axles and in making “tar paper.” Rope, soaked in pitch, was driven between the planks of ships to make them watertight and to coat hulls for protection from sea worms of tropical waters.
FROM THE NATIONAL PARKS SERVICE
