Chronicling a Tree: Thoreau's Concord Elm

This Old Tree

Concord, Massachusetts, 1856. Four men cut down a huge, seemingly healthy American elm tree using block and tackle, and ropes drawn by a horse. The graceful tree towered above a house whose owners heard creaking during a storm - they felt unsafe and had it removed. The event would have been long forgotten, except one of America’s greatest writers and earliest environmentalists also lived in Concord - Henry David Thoreau.

Supremely ticked-off, the removal of the stately elm inspired a flurry of journal writing by Thoreau that defined elms as symbols of virtue that looked to Concord’s past and the country’s future. Guest Thomas Campanella, Professor at Cornell University and author of Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm, shares his work. It turns out, elm trees helped define our young nation’s sense of itself.

Guest
Thomas J. Campanella
Professor of City and Regional Planning
Cornell University
Republic of Shade: New England and the American Elm, Yale University Press, 2003.
Henry David Thoreau and the Yankee Elm, Arnoldia, 2001.
Other Sources:
Thoreau and the Language of Trees, Richard Higgins, Univ of California Press, 2017.
Podcast Consultant
Martha Douglas-Osmundson
Music
"Nothing Like the Summer," Brightarm Orchestra
Theme Music
Diccon Lee, www.deeleetree.com
Artwork
Dahn Hiuni, www.dahnhiuni.com/home
Website
thisoldtree.show
Transcripts available.
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This Old Tree podcast is a sponsored project of New England ISA. To support This Old Tree and New England ISA, click here.
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This episode was written in part at LitArts RI, a community organization and co-working space that supports Rhode Island's creators.
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1. Intro - A tree cut down in Concord,MA (00:00:00)

2. Thoreau's disappointment and journal writing about the loss of the elm (00:01:51)

3. Thomas Campanella introduction (00:05:30)

4. Thoreau's interest in the tree and disdain for some townspeople (00:07:32)

5. American elms consecrate the landscape (00:15:56)

6. The unique aesthetic of American Elm (00:18:26)

7. Why the American elm? (00:22:32)

8. The fashion for exotics - Lombardy poplar and Tree of Heaven (00:25:23)

9. Native Trees demonstrate a new nationalism. The Village Improvement Movement (00:34:22)

10. The elm as metaphor for abolitionism (00:44:04)

11. Wrap-up with Tom (00:53:13)