LOFTY TREES

 

Author's Personal Collection

The following excerpt is from an 1851 Vermont newspaper article recounting John Charles Frémont's description of redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

"The writer speaks thus of some trees on the coast mountain between St. Joseph [San Jose] and Santa Cruz."

"The mountains were wooded with many varieties of trees, and in some parts with heavy forests. These forests are characteri[z]ed by a cypress of extraordinary dimensions already mentioned among the forest trees of America, by its superior size and height. Among many which we measured in this part of the mountain, nine and ten feet in diameter was frequent, eleven sometimes, but going beyond eleven only in a single instance, which reached fourteen feet in diameter. Above 200 feet was a frequent height. In this locality the bark was very deeply furrowed, and unusually thick, being fully sixteen inches in some of the trees …"

"This is the staple timber tree of the country, being cut into both boards and shingles, and is the [principal] timber sawed at the mills. It is soft and easily worked, wearing away too quickly too be used for floors. It seems to have all the durability which anciently gave the Cypress so much celebrity. Posts which have been exposed to the weather three quarters of a century (since the foundation of the missions) shows no marks of decay in the wood and are now converted into beams and posts for private dwellings. In California this tree is called the palo colorado. It is the king of trees."

Source:  “Lofty Trees,” Aurora of the Valley [Newberry, Vermont], July 24, 1851.