GOTHIC ARCHES

This postcard appears to show the curly redwood General Sherman Tree in the foreground - Author's Personal Collection

In 1902 the Woman’s Press Club of New York City sent Ms. Ellen M. Staples on a cross-country journey. Her “pilgrimage” from New York to Los Angeles was to attend the Sixth Biennial of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. She was part of a group of about 150 members of Women’s Clubs from New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Maryland. Their journey took place aboard what was described as the ‘Federation Special’ via Southern Pacific. The group departed on April 24^th, returning home on May 19th. Ms. Staples, serving as the group’s historian, dedicated the published account of their trip to the officers and members of the Woman’s Press Club.

 

One of the ladies’ stops was the world-famous Big Trees Grove resort in Felton.

 

"… We left our own train at Santa Cruz for our visit to the crowned heads of America … It is not alone the gigantic proportions of the big trees that awe one into silence, but the fact that one stands in a presence, a living presence, whose age is reckoned in eons. It seems so marvelous that these trees, still drawing their nourishment from the ground beneath one' s feet, still taking on year by year the concentric rings that record their life-story, away down the remote cycles of time 'Saw the light that shone on Mohammed's uplifted crescent, on many a royal gilded throne and deed forgotten in the present; Aye, saw the age of sacred trees and Druid groves and mystic larches; and saw from forest domes like these The builder bring his Gothic arches.'"

Ms. Staples ends her description of the brief visit to the Big Trees with a quote from the Bret Harte poem entitled, "On A Cone of the Big Trees." Apparently, Harte was inspired to write his poem as an ode to a giant sequoia cone sitting on his desk. But I agree with Ms. Staples. It works just as well for describing the giant redwoods too.

 

Source: A Twentieth-Century Pilgrim’s Progress, by Ellen M. Staples, 1903.