DEDICATED TO SERVICE

In June 1938 a delegation of Rotary members traveled to Big Trees Grove as one of the highlights of their San Francisco convention. They came to dedicate a tree to Rotary International and chose to bestow that honor upon the Giant.

The Rotarian, July 1938

Rotary, which claims to be the world’s first service club, was organized in 1905 by Chicago lawyer Paul Harris and his friends to bring together professionals from diverse backgrounds to exchange ideas and form lifelong friendships. With the founding of a club in Canada in 1910 it became Rotary International.

Today Rotary International is a, non-political and non-religious international service organization whose stated purpose is to bring together business and professional leaders in order to provide humanitarian service and to advance goodwill and peace around the world.

The Rotary Tree ceremony was reportedly the first tree dedication at the grove in ten years. The June 17, 1938 Santa Cruz Evening News described the crowd as composed of five hundred Rotarians from thirty-seven countries. Maurice Du Perrey, president of Rotary International, addressed the assembly saying “Let us hope that the spirit of Rotary will be as enduring and as sturdy throughout the centuries as this magnificent tree.” Harry Bias, former president of the Santa Cruz Rotary Club, presented redwood burl book-ends to Harris and Du Perrey.

Photograph by Harry A. Kay from The Rotarian, August 1938

The August 1938 Rotarian magazine article about the dedication included some interesting statistics. It estimated that the Giant contained 425,916 feet of lumber and if cut would produce 1 ¼ million shingles. The article also boasted that the Giant was 4,500 years old, representing “a year for nearly every Club in Rotary” (today most estimates of the Giant’s age lay between 1,500 to over 2,000 years). Though the article mentioned a dedication plaque, the whereabouts of one remains unknown.

Interestingly, a tree in the grove was first dedicated to Rotary International back in 1922, the founding year of the Santa Cruz Rotary Club. The earlier tree was described as “a mother tree in the center of a group of smaller trees.” In his dedication address Second vice-president Alexander Wilkie stated that 

“I can conceive of no truer emblem of the spirit of Rotary than this, I may say almost immortal, living tree. It symbolizes life everlasting, work and human effort everlasting for the good of the world, and this is the true spirit of Rotary. Here in the midst stood the mother tree and though it is gone its way to serve its purpose in the order of things, yet is has given forth new life as represented by this circle of living trees. I may liken it to the emblem of Rotary, the wheel with the circle of cogs.”

This 1922 tree dedication was described as “a day that will long be remembered not only by the members from Santa Cruz, but by visiting Rotarians from many parts of the United States and foreign lands.” Despite the soaring rhetoric the memory of this first Rotary Tree dedication did fade, and the location of this apparent cathedral tree remains unknown.