New England Icon: White Pine

Tall, White, and Handsome Late fall in New England is a revelation, literally. When the maples and oaks and other deciduous trees have put on their famously colorful display and then dropped all their leaves, the conifers are revealed. The firs, spruces, and pines have been there all along, clustered in mountainside groves or dotted here and there throughout the forest, their dark-green beauty a subtle complement to their more showy neighbors. Chief among them is pinus strobus, the white pine, quintessential king of the forest, the tallest tree in New England, and the one most deeply entwined with the region’s history. No sooner had the first Europeans set eyes on these pines than they were writing back home about their size. On his 1605 voyage, Captain George Weymouth of the Royal British Navy collected white pine seeds and logs along the coast of Maine, bringing them home to London with him (which worked out nicely, as the tree is now called the Weymouth pine in Great Britain). What his bosses saw surpassed natural beauty—as masts, these trees would help them in their efforts to build the world’s most powerful navy. Tall, straight trees were hard to get in the old country; the British Isles lacked them, and suppliers in the Baltic regions were beginning to squeeze their Admiralty customers, charging more and more for a dwindling supply of strong yet relatively lightweight pines and firs. As the arms race proceeded through the 17th century, naval designers called for taller and taller masts for their bigger and badder killing machines. As William R. Carlton wrote in his 1939 article in the New England Quarterly, “Masts, in the days of wooden ships, played a far greater part in world affairs than merely that of supporting canvas. They were of vital necessity to the lives of nations. Statesmen plotted to obtain them; ships of the line fought to procure them.” And so it was that beginning in 1691, successive British kings claimed for themselves all colonial white pines greater than 24 inches in diameter, with royal agents marking trees with three strikes of a hatchet: the King’s Broad Arrow. The Massachusetts Bay Charter had a “mast-preservation” clause that called for a 100-pound penalty for every such tree felled without a royal license. With tens of thousands of square miles and only a handful of agents, however, it wasn’t an easy law to police. The colonists were wily as well: Lloyd Irland, a forestry consultant, writer, and white pine aficionado, points to the 1760 Pownalborough Courthouse in Dresden, Maine, the only surviving colonial-era courthouse in the state. The pine wall paneling inside is made of boards 23 ½ inches wide, he says, “and I’m pretty sure they shaved them down just enough to poke the King and his agents in the eye.” It’s estimated that 4,500 masts were shipped to England between 1694 and 1775, many of them aboard specially constructed ships with large stern ports, capable of carrying 50 enormous logs below deck. Felling these monsters required great skill, care, and scores of men, including a host of agents and contractors, as this was big business with much money to be made. The trees they sought were clear of branches to at least 80 feet; branches above were cut and placed as a bed to lessen the chances that a “stick” would break when it crashed to the ground. Some logs weighed as much as 18 tons; up to 100 oxen were required to bear the tree, on sleds or wheels according to the season, from the forest to the coast. With such a valuable resource all around, it’s no wonder that many versions of the colonial Flag of New England (there never was an official one) featured the white pine. When it was time to hoist the Stars and Stripes at the launch of the USS Constitution in 1797, the masts from which the new flag flew were New England white pine. And when Henry David Thoreau started building on Walden Pond in the spring of 1845, he chose a spot shaded by “tall arrowy white pines,” a few of the smaller of which he cut down and hewed into timbers six inches square, to frame up his famous house. Thoreau wasn’t the only guy cutting down trees. Between 1890 and 1920, a “white pine boom” hit New England, with a prodigious amount (15 billion board feet) of second-growth trees sawn into lumber and turned into boxes, pails, and any number of other products that benefited from its light weight and easy workability. Nature took its own toll as well. Stephen Long, author of Thirty-Eight, The Hurricane That Transformed New England, writes that of the millions of trees blown down, 70 percent or more were white pines. That’s a reflection of the sheer prevalence of the species, which had grown back first, fast, and dense in the years after so many New England farmers abandoned their fields for factory work or more fertile land out west. The species has retained that ability to bounce back, and today it remains the most important commercial tree species in northern New England, turned into boards, paneling, cabinetry, windows, and doors, with some wood exported abroad. If you want to experience what Captain Weymouth might have, then head to Mohawk Trail State Forest on Route 2 in Western Massachusetts. Its 7,758 acres hold spectacular mountain ridges, gorges, rivers, and a stretch of the original Mohawk Trail, which connected the Hudson and Connecticut river valleys and served as a trade and war route from the 1600s to American independence. But it’s the pines that draw Bob Leverett, the country’s premiere tree-measuring expert, to this forest. Using a highly accurate laser rangefinder, and occasionally double-checking with “tape drops” after scaling the trees, he measures height to the inch. Among the forest’s nine named pine groves, he’s found 138 trees of more than 150 feet, with 18 surpassing 160 feet, including a 175-foot giant that he estimates has been growing since before the Civil War. It is, Leverett says, the tallest tree in all of New England, proving that there’s more than one way to show off.