Laurel Hill Cemetery's legendary 'witness tree' is felled

The tree was a living link to more than 160 years of Philadelphia history, and a favorite spot for tourists and history buffs.

Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes - all Civil War generals and U.S. presidents - once sheltered beneath its branches at Laurel Hill Cemetery in the city's East Falls section. Legendary Union Gens. Philip Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and Dan Sickles were there, too, on the same gentle slope overlooking the Schuylkill.

They bowed their heads next to a Norway maple, standing like a sentry over the grave of a comrade, George Gordon Meade, victorious commander at the Battle of Gettysburg whose heroism helped save Philadelphia from Confederate invaders and prompted the city's elite to give his family a house in gratitude.

Meade was a larger-than-life figure in war and in peace, serving on the Fairmount Park Commission and often riding his former warhorse, "Old Baldy," in the park near the then-future site of Memorial Hall, where an equestrian statue of him now stands.

The aged tree near his modest tombstone was the living witness to that time and so treasured by Laurel Hill and friends of the cemetery that they babied it over the years, even hiring an arborist to prune it and tie up fragile branches with metal cables to stabilize and strengthen them against the wind - a tree version of a senior's walker.

On Saturday, that slice of city history - about 50,000 pounds of it - was brought down, piece by piece, appropriately enough over a Memorial Day weekend.


Read more at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20160529_Laurel_Hill_Cemetery_s_legendary_Norway_maple__witness_tree__is_felled.html#iKI6dYYPLPsKXDMg.99