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The History of The American Giant
The American Giant Chestnut Tree, until its death, was a quiet anchor in the fields bordering the Willamette River just downstream from Oregon’s original British/American settlement. Dr. John McLoughlin, an employee of the Hudson’s Bay Company, founded a small camp near Willamette Falls in 1829 and encouraged settlers to establish homesteads in the area. By 1839, a thriving town provided a gateway to the rich farmlands above the Falls for enterprising newcomers from the East.
The settlers often brought with them seeds and nuts to plant as a reminder of home, and it is likely that The American Giant was planted in this way, in a quiet field on the eastern uplands about a mile below the falls. Sometime before 1850 the stationary journey from seedling to American Giant began. Chestnut trees grow rapidly in their youth and so before 1860 this sapling was producing chestnuts for human consumption. During this time, a road was built along the banks of the river from the settlement, now called Oregon City to the newly established port of Portland. The tree was but 100 yards from the new road.
For the next forty years the tree grew and thrived in sight of the road and the river and the people who traveled them, and the Willamette Valley became a settled and populated area. Oregon City, however, suffered a downturn as Portland became Oregon’s largest city and far upriver Salem became the state capitol. The tree was likely three feet in diameter and eighty feet tall by 1900, and each fall it provided a huge bounty of nuts for human and animal consumption alike. No one paid much attention, however. It was just another tree in a field, similar to the 4.5 billion wild trees just like it back East.
That changed in 1900 in New York with the introduction of the Asian Chestnut Blight, a deadly fungus that proved fatal in the next thirty years to nearly every one of the 4.5 billion American Chestnut trees. It was termed the greatest ecological disaster since the ice age. The tree that had provided timber, winter food and tanning bark for the settlement of East was gone from the landscape. The Blight marched steadily across the continent, stopped only by the Great American Desert.
Back in Oregon, safe on the banks of the Willamette River, protected by the steady winds from the Pacific, the young American Giant continued to prosper into the Great Depression, providing food each fall and putting on more wood each spring. By 1930 it was four feet in diameter and had reached ninety feet in height with a crown spread of seventy feet or more. It was truly a magnificent tree, even then. And it was surrounded by the largest stand of commercial timber left on the continent, the vast Douglas Fir forests of Oregon and Washington. With all that timber to cut, no one worried about cutting a lone tree in a field.
By 1950, the postwar boom had hit Oregon and the Willamette Valley full force. The single lane road between Oregon City and Portland had become Highway 99E, the main North-South four lane artery to California. Towns and houses, stores and gas stations sprang up overnight. The American Giant was 150 feet from the edge of the highway and the field was made ever smaller with the addition of houses in a subdivision directly behind the field. A street was paved connecting 99E with the subdivision that passed a mere thirty feet from the roots of the American Giant.
And yet it still thrived and prospered. By 1980 the tree was more than six feet in diameter and nearly one hundred feet tall, pouring out chestnuts by the ton in the fall, and providing a wide and deep canopy of shade in the summer. Even the construction of commercial buildings along the highway, less than seventy-five feet away, did not harm the tree. In 1986 Clackamas County Extension Agent, Michael Bondi nominated the American Giant as the Oregon State Record Largest American Chestnut tree and its authenticity of lineage was verified by The American Chestnut Foundation and their expert, Dr. Fred Hebard. People came for miles around to see this amazing tree. It was one of but a few dozen left alive on the continent.
Nobody told the developers how to save the tree
Sometime after 1980, the neighboring parking lot was paved, coming within a few feet of the base of the tree, cutting off about twenty percent of its functional root area. Then in 2000, a builder purchased the last small portion of the field, now a neighborhood dumping ground, with plans to build a modest house for resale. In order to clean out the refuse and excavate for the house, he lowered the level of the lot by 30 inches and built a block wall around the base of the tree a few feet from the trunk. The purchaser of the house describes the tree as retreating down the huge branches until in its final season there were only a few leaves on the very lowest portions of the tree. The upper branches were rotting and during winter storms the threat below was very real. Tree professionals said nothing could be done to save the tree.
American Chestnut is a wild species, meant to thrive in a mixed forest, not as a street or yard tree. Despite the ever-encroaching civilization around it, it continued to grow till the end. It was measured eight feet four inches in diameter in 2007, having continued to put on wood since last measured in 1986.
The American Giant, a truly unique and historic tree had survived the Chestnut Blight, but had fallen to the Urban Blight. Sadly, it was carefully taken down by tree professional using a sixty-ton crane on April 13th 2007.
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