Gettysburg Sycamore tree comes down.

[william42]

It can't tell from this article if there are still two other of these trees alive. Maybe somebody could shed some light on that. It would be kind of cool to find bullets in the tree. The paper also posts a photo of a section of the trunk with the story. It's almost completely hollow inside.

Terry



Gettysburg Sycamore Tree That Was Witness is Felled




From “The Civil War News” – Feb/March 2006

By Deborah Fitts


Gettysburg, PA – One of the most prominent living witnesses to the battle of Gettysburg bit the dust Nov. 25.
A huge sycamore tree on Baltimore Pike was determined to be dead or dying, and a safety hazard to passers-by beneath. In a matter of hours it was reduced to a pile of limbs and trunk sections, some of which will be preserved.
The tree was one of a prominent trio of sycamores that lined Baltimore Street just north of the Steinwehr Avenue intersection. They are visible as mature trees in a photograph taken Nov. 19, 1863, of a procession advancing up the street toward the new national cemetery, where Abraham Lincoln would deliver his Gettysburg Address. The top-hatted president is visible in the photo, passing in front of the trees.
“Its been dying for about five years,” said Jane Scott, chairman of Gettysburg Boroughs Shade Tree Commission. “It was a hazard.” The tree was mostly on private property, an insurance business located in an1819 brick building on the corner of Baltimore Street and the entrance to Gettysburgs Lincoln Elementary School.
Preservations were quick to realize that some use could be made of the sawn-up wood. Jim Paddock, a landscape architect and leader in the No ****** Gettysurg movement, had the tree service deliver large pieces to his farm west of town. The grassroots group is fighting a proposal to build a ****** near the battlefield.
“Its kind of sad to see one of these three go, but there really wasn’t much choice,” said Paddock. “It was hollow and dead and basically a danger.”
The base of the tree was still solid, and the Cumberland Valley Tree Service cut several slices a half-foot thick as mementos. The property owner got one and one went to the Griends of the National Parks at Gettysburg. A spokesman for the Friends said the slab may eventually appear as an exhibit at the nonprofits visitor center and museum, located nearby on Baltimore Street.
Meanwhile, Paddock is contemplating auctioning off a trunk section and using other bits of wood in fund-raising opportunities to support No ****** Gettysburg and the Land Conservancy of Adams County. “It’s a way for people to actually get something they’d like while giving to a good cause,” he explained.
Paddock noted, “Everybody expects there’s going to be some lead bullets in the tree,” buried in the wood or fallen to the bottom of the hollow log. He said he was hunting for a technology to locate metal before cutting into the wood.
Scott, of the Shade Tree Commission, recalled that heavy trimming was undertaken on the same sycamore about six years ago, which raised an outcry. The Borough stepped in because “Citizens were all upset,” she said, and the work was halted.