Expedition to find the oldest living thing in New England

What is the oldest living thing in New England? And what could we learn from it about seeing the past and future from the perspective of hundreds of years and about being good ancestors?

Members of Long Now Boston and their friends set out along with Steve Wardell in October to answer these and other questions on an expedition to find the oldest living thing in New England. A number of authorities claim that the oldest living thing would likely be a tree of a long-lived species such as tupelo (black gum), cedar, and Eastern hemlock, examples of which can live over 600 years.

We set out to find a specific tree that is a candidate to be the oldest. In this case it is a tupelo tree off the beaten trail in the woods of Epping, New Hampshire. The tree had been previously visited by the Big Tree Project of the University of New Hampshire, which named it Tree #618. The Big Tree Project believes that Tree 618 is the largest tupelo in northern New England yet found.

The expedition members first parked at the Mast Road Natural Area, a parcel of wild forest owned by the Southeast Land Trust of New Hampshire. There we met up with a local guide from the Big Tree Project, Kevin Martin, who is also the author of Big Trees of Northern New England, a guidebook to hikes to see accessible big trees.

From there, after twenty minutes of walking through a forested swamp that was thankfully unseasonably dry, with the help of GPS coordinates in their phones, the party members finally came across Tree 618 which stood out compared to its neighbors for its great circumference and height. The party assessed the tree as still looking in robust good health despite its age and the party photographed and measured the tree.

In colonial times, the area around Epping would have been heavily logged. Despite this parcel of land being swampy then, as now, it would still have been treated as a woodlot by locals, and so nearly all the trees would have been cut down over time. The name of the nearby road, Mast Road, comes from the region originally having tall straight old-growth pines that were logged for ship masts. However, the residents in New Hampshire and everywhere in the Northeast often left the tupelo trees untouched when logging. As our guide explained, the wood is very hard and difficult for carpenters to work, so craftsmen didn’t want it; and the wood doesn’t split well for firewood either.

So New England still has many examples of old tupelo trees because they are naturally long-lived and they were not cut down for their wood. Other factors that help the tupelo tree live a long time include that it grows slowly enabling it to wait for an opening in the canopy to take advantage of and that the hard wood is resistant to rot and insects. The tree also thrives in swampy areas which provide it with water even during otherwise dry periods with the help of an especially long taproot to get to below-surface water during droughts. In addition, swamp areas often keep out humans who are looking for wood or for good land for other human purposes.

Our team used a measuring tape to measure the tree circumference (141”) and crown diameter (58’4”). We used a laser rangefinder to measure the tree’s height at 87’. Together these measurements give the tree a score of 243 points on the National Big Tree Registry scoring system.

Our guide estimated the tree’s age to be at least 400 years old and possibly older which means it dates to at least the era of the founding of Plymouth Colony. The tree has never been cored so the number of rings is not known.

On the way back to Boston, the party stopped at the Endicott Pear Tree in Danvers, Mass., which was originally grown in England in ~1630 and then transported by sea by John Endicott, the first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, to Danvers where he planted it in ~1632 and where it still stands and bears pears to this day.

Eastern hemlocks are also candidates to be the oldest living things in New England and the party saw a number of them on their trek, but none that were particularly old. Our guide mentioned that a multi-decade plague of wooly adelgid insects has been sickening and killing New England’s hemlocks, including older ones, which could lead to a change in the make-up of the census of very old trees in the region.

Future steps in the project to find the oldest living thing in New England include visiting other black tupelo trees and Eastern hemlocks to find specimens that are potentially even older than the one that we saw today. Further research should be done on other candidates for the oldest living things in the region including looking at Greenland sharks in the Massachusetts Bay, underground funguses, and extremophile microbes in caves.