Historical Artifacts in Your Yard

We walk and move where others have been. That is a very loose definition of history and if you put this thought in your mind while working in your yard or moving about in your sphere, historical inquiry will be born there.

My inquiry always leads me to maps. The Roswell Historical Society is a wonderful source for old maps. It was the late Aubrey Morris who alerted me to this and urged me to go visit them. I thoroughly enjoyed pouring over these maps, looking at the old roads and place names. 

I also enjoy looking at the aerial photographs provided by the U.S. Geological Survey. I can’t help but get an eerie feeling when I do this. There were real people living somewhere in that photo. Did they look up at the sky and wonder about that plane? What would they have thought if you told them I, Mrs. Julie Hogg, presently of Crabapple, would someday be studying a picture of them taken on Aug. 10th, 1951?

As for events and people from 100 or 150 years ago, we have great resources with our local historical societies. They can provide the names of families, what they did for a living, how much land they owned. We can see marriage, birth, and death records. We can even see pictures going back well into the 1800’s. 

But what do we do when there is no oral history, no written history and no photos of any kind? Well, we always have the old structures; what few of them are left. The south has never been great about preserving its old structures thanks to progress, or carpetbaggers, or some combination of the two. 

There remains one last identifier of history, albeit one whose lips are mostly sealed. It marks where homes have been, where picnics were had and where people existed. It marks where trails have been, and sometimes literally points the direction in which that trail goes. If only it could talk it would tell of every tornadic event and drought for the past 150, sometimes even 200 or so years. It would tell of living through all the various enterprises of man, whether that be hunting for food, or planting cotton or mowing it all down to build a strip shopping center. I refer, of course, to the noble tree. 

There is a reason people are so enamored of big, old trees. It is because we know they’ve been there.  Where? There – through time and history. They’ve lived where we did not. They’ve witnessed what we did not, and their rings, if we could see them, would at least tell us about weather events, as drought years almost always show up in tree rings. As for the other things trees “see”, well, you can anthropomorphize a tree only so much, but that doesn’t keep us from regarding these old specimens with a bit of eerie wonder because they are living connections to the past. When I see the apple tree my husband’s father planted 40 years ago I get the sense of my father-in-law. He was there. He saw it. He held it and put it in the ground. And although my father in law passed away in 1991, his tree still stands today. That means something. 

There is an old tree on the Winterthur Estate called the William Penn tree. It is said that this tree was around in the days of William Penn, which would place this tree in the era of the late 1600’s to early 1700’s. This much beloved tree has been cabled, propped, and tended to in order to extend it’s life much beyond the natural life of this tree, but no one can bear to part with it because of what this tree has lived through and how it connects those who see the tree today with the past. This is the reason we love our big, old trees and the reason we should strive to save as many of them as we can – because we have a fundamental need to connect to history. Trees are the historical artifacts we find in our own yards. 

Because progress and trees seem to be at cross purposes, we will always lose trees for the sake of shopping, homes, schools and otherwise. And to be sure, tree boards and tree ordinances exist to see that this is done in an orderly and proper fashion. But, sadly, sometimes progress sweeps aside the good intentions of tree boards. Sometimes they even end up being caricatured as “tree-huggers” although that is often a gross misrepresentation. These alleged tree-huggers are simply people, like me, who cringe at the chain-sawing of history even when it’s done for good reasons. 

I suspect that most people, yes, the majority of people, love trees and especially love big, old, historical trees. Don’t call us tree-huggers. Call us historians.