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The Artist’s
Almanac
February 2006
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Generations pass
while some trees stand, and old families last not three oaks.
- Sir Thomas Browne
Our best and oldest
friends we take for granted. Trees furnish us food and fuel, flower
and shade and they ease our passage into the dark season with a
final burst of color. From their lofts avian choirs cheer our days.
They are sacrificed to build and to furnish our homes. As more of
their functions are replaced by plastics, minerals, metals and
fossil fuels, we today choose them more for their beauty than their
utility. Lumber is from distant timber plantations, and heat comes
from Texas or from western strip mines.
We have more trees
around us than did our ancestors a century ago. Many of them are
exotics -some good, some not so. Only the bad ones reproduce
themselves and flourish as pests, such as the tree of heaven,
pawlonia, and the bodoc, responsible for burning down many a house.
Native trees reseed
and flourish as well. But we scarcely notice them when we are
outside in the warm seasons - they all wear the same color dress.
Yet underneath it, they, like we, are individuals, with differing
family traits and characters. A sunny winter day is the perfect time
to get to know them.
This is when cedars
come into their own. Scruffy and disagreeable as teenagers, they
breed promiscuously. They infect nearby apple orchards and are
considered by some a weed tree. Yet, like many a passionate youth,
they age into a dignified presence with massive columns for trunks
and somber heads of green majesty, best seen in winter. Their blue
berries furnish the vital ingredient (and the name, from juniperus)
for English gin.
Trees tell us our
history. White sycamores in winter mark the springs the settler
sought as the first necessity for a home site. Maples were his
source of sugar, and the tall, fast-growing poplars furnished the
flooring and siding for his cabin, as did chestnut, if he were
lucky, the logs. Cherry or walnut were preferred for the sugar chest
or sideboard, and cedar split well for rail fences. Oak was good for
firewood and about everything else, if he could rive it.
Tree lines still mark
the ancient boundaries today. While these are usually second and
third generation, the trees were left to grow as they made
convenient posts for latter-day wire as well as visual boundaries
seen from afar. In preparing for a presentation to an historical
society later this month, the surest guide to platting early deeds
was tree lines visible in aerial photographs, some perfect square
mile grants. Another sure sign of these was the 10% tilt in all of
them caused by a now-recognized error in locating north by early
compasses.
The age of the oldest
living oak known today in America is reckoned as six hundred years.
The white oak whose twenty-foot circumference I am measuring below
is estimated by an official of the Tennessee Forestry Division as
being as much as three hundred years old. If so, it was already a
centenarian when settlers passed beneath it and its fellows along
the Avery’s trace in 1800.
Appended is an
invitation to join us at the Annual Meeting of Bledsoe’s Lick
Historical Association where we will present a progress report on
two months of mapping Ashers-Averys Trace from Halls Station to
Pilots Knob. Using old maps and the earliest aerial photos, pre
emption deed references, space age Global Positioning Systems,
ancient trees and double treelines, written histories, anecdotal
evidence, artifacts, photos and, mainly, on site observations, we
have developed a pretty good idea of where it was, and, in many
cases, still is. The revelations of the history under our feet
continue to astound us.
It is a work in
process. Every old road leads to the discovery of others, as well as
to previously undiscovered pioneer forts and stations. Each of them
has its own dramatic stories of courage, losses and riches beyond
the dreams of landless Revolutionary war veterans on America's
eastern seaboard. But they had to earn it, not only from the
British, but from the savages who roamed it.
You won't want to miss
this. Come and be with us.
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Bill
Puryear, Artist