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Claremont NH

The 6 Tallest Trees in New England

Once New England had the greatest forests and the tallest trees in the world. They were a major attraction for English colonists and their sponsors, who coveted the huge white pines as masts for the King’s Royal Navy. The Crown reserved the biggest pine trees, which government agents marked with three slashes called the King’s Broad Arrow.

The laws protecting the trees for the King were honored more in the breach than in the observance. Pine trees became a symbol of resistance, and images of them appeared in flags.

The New England Flag

Tall trees exercised a fascination over people apart from their political context. Societies formed to identify champion trees. And today, many states maintain registries of their tallest and biggest trees.

The Tallest Trees

In 1940 a nonprofit called American Forests started the National Register of Big Trees and named the Wye Oak in Maryland as the national champion for more than 60 years. But measuring the tallest trees isn’t always an exact science, and most champions yield their place to new specimens. Either another tree grows taller or the champion is felled by disease, weather or real estate developers.

We did our best to identify the tallest tree in each state. But who knows? A storm could have felled it since it was last measured. If you know of a tree taller than the ones mentioned – or if any of those trees have fallen – please comment below.

Connecticut’s Gold Standard

Pinchot Sycamore, one of Connecticut’s tallest trees.

The most famous tree in Connecticut, other than the Charter Oak, is the 104-foot-tall Pinchot Sycamore in Simsbury. It’s 28 feet around and at least 200 years old — if not 300 years old. It was named after Gifford Pinchot and officially dedicated to the conservationist in 1965.

The big old sycamore sits on the east bank of the Farmington River near the base of Talcott Mountain. Floodlights illuminate it at night, and canoers can launch their boats nearby. For a while the Pinchot Sycamore tied the largest sycamore with a specimen in Bath County, Virginia, until a bigger one in Ashland, Ohio, surpassed them both.

The Pinchot Sycamore, though, is not the tallest tree in Connecticut. That honor belongs to a 144.6-foot-tall white pine in a small forest in West Cornwall called Gold’s Pines, named after the man who purchased it in 1870, Theodore S. Gold. The forest grew to 46 acres, and then 56. It now belongs to the Housatonic State Forest as one of the few old growth forests in Connecticut.

“Here, even on the brightest of blue sky days, the gentle wind makes a thunderous noise as it passes through,” wrote one hiker who waxed elegiac about the canopy of the ancients.

You can reach Gold’s Pines on Rte. 128, just right of the Little Guild of St. Francis animal shelter. Gold’s Pines also boasts a 127.8-foot-tall Tulip tree.

Maine’s Unofficial Champ

Yarmouth Dutch elms, possibly the tallest trees in Maine once.

There are no reliable height measurements in Maine available, according to the Monumental Tree index. Maine has its own registry of big trees, which it updates periodically but is considered unreliable. Maine residents nominate trees for the honor of appearing in the registry. The 120-foot white pine in Morrill is the unofficial tallest tree in Maine.

Maine, however, can claim the tallest chestnut tree in North America. The tree is 115-feet high, 20 feet higher than its closest competitor. Only a few dozen chestnut trees remain in Maine, as chestnut blight wiped out large stands of the trees from Maine to Georgia in the early 1900s.

The chestnut was discovered last year in a forest in Lovell, near the New Hampshire border. The forest was once part of an artist colony, Hewnoaks, founded by artist Douglas Volk (1856-1935) and his wife. Volk’s wife donated the property to the University of Maine Foundation.

Maine was once home to the largest Dutch elm tree, nicknamed Herbie. Planted in 1793 on Main Street in Yarmouth, Herbie grew to 110 feet tall with a circumference of 20 feet. Children watched some of its diseased limbs being cut off and cried, “What are you going to do to Herbie?”

Herbie finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease and fell to the ax and chainsaw on Jan. 19, 2010. A section of the trunk’s base was displayed at the 2010 Yarmouth Clam Festival. You can now see it outside Yarmouth’s town hall.

Jake Swamp

Along the Mohawk Trail, where you’ll find some of Massachusetts’ tallest trees.

The tallest tree in Massachusetts has a name: Jake Swamp. It’s a 163.2-foot white pine in the Trees of Peace Grove in Mohawk Trail State Forest. The forest, located in Charlemont, Hawley, and Savoy, has 83 trees reaching 148 feet, the largest collection of tall white pines in New England. It was discovered by Robert Leverett, a big-tree hunter and co-author of The Sierra Club Guide to Ancient Forests of the Northeast.

In 1996 Leverett helped found the Eastern Native Tree Society. Its members search for old stands in remote places and for giant trees in parks and cemeteries. When Leverett discovered the tallest white pine in Massachusetts, he named it after Mohawk Chief Jake Swamp Tekaronianeken.

Jake Swamp founded the Tree of Peace Society in 1982. He traveled around the world planting Trees of Peace near places such as the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and Constitution Hall in Philadelphia. A year after his death in 2010, trees were planted around the world on October 18 on what would have been his 70^th birthday. A Tree of Peace was planted in his honor in Huntington Park, Mass.

Reader Norman Schell personally measured another giant tree in Massachusetts: the Sycamore on Rte. 47 in the center of Sunderland. A sapling when the United States ratified the Constitution, it measures 32 feet in circumference. It is acknowledged as the oldest and largest Sycamore tree east of the Mississippi.

New Hampshire’s Skinny White Pine

White pines, probably the tallest trees in New Hampshire if not all of New England.

The tallest tree in New Hampshire is a white pine measuring 166.1 feet tall on a private estate in Claremont. It was declared the new New England champion by the Native Tree Society. It’s a mystery to us who owns the estate, but if you’re in Claremont just look for a tall stand of white pines. The tallest one is ‘extraordinarily skinny,’ according to Robert Leverett, one of the men who measured it.

There were also extraordinarily tall white oaks in the Claremont stand. “The 115.2-foot white oak blew my mind,” wrote one big tree hunter. “The growing conditions have to be superb to support such a height for white oak so far north.”

Additionally, the Bradford Pines Natural Area in Bradford has trees over 200 years old and over 150 feet tall. Randy Redford believes they may be the tallest trees in New Hampshire, if not all of New England. They even have lightning rods on them.

A sugar maple in Ossipee was believed to be the biggest in New England until it fell in 1846. It yielded 3,300 board feet of lumber and nine cords of firewood.

According to legend, a pine cut on the site of Dartmouth College reached a height of 240 feet. But many doubt the species can grow so tall.

The Mighty Tulip

Tulip trees, the tallest trees in Rhode Island.

Several tulip trees have been identified as Rhode Island’s tallest tree.

According to the Cranston Herald, the tallest tree in Rhode Island is at 975 Warwick Neck Ave. in Warwick. The Rhode Island Champion Tree List of 2014 shows a Warwick tulip tree measuring 126 feet high as the tallest in the state.

The Native Tree Society, however, claims a 115.7-foot tulip tree on the ‘Nathaniel Green’ site in Kingston. They could be referring to the University of Rhode Island Campus.

The tulip tree has large flowers that sort of resemble tulips. Sometimes it’s called a tulip poplar or yellow poplar, but it’s actually related to the magnolia. Indians hollowed out its wood to make canoes from its light wood, and sometimes people refer to it as a canoewood tree.

The fattest tulip tree, measuring 16 feet around, is in Bristol. Click here for a map of a walking tour of the town’s historic district, where the tree resides.

Vermont’s White Pine

A tall white pine

Vermont’s tallest tree is a 143.4-foot white pine in Arlington, according to the Eastern Native Tree Society. It’s tucked in among one of the state’s best collections of large-diameter white pines, the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area. There they are safe from development.

The Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area was a 1975 gift to the state from the heirs of Vermont writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher. Fisher, a tireless social activist, promoted education and prison reform. Though originally from Lawrence, Kansas, Fisher adopted Vermont as her home state.

The Arlington property that is now a protected wildlife area served as Fisher’s writing retreat during a career that produced more than 40 books, both nonfiction and fiction (largely set in Vermont).

Vermont takes its champion trees seriously. The state keeps a registry of its biggest and tallest trees by town and species, from the Dwarf Chinkapin Oak in Bridport to a giant Cottonwood in Hubbardton. To check it out, click here.

You can visit the Fisher-Scott Memorial Pines Natural Area on Route 7A just north of Arlington.

Photos: Pinchot sycamore: By Msact at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48227856. Pinchot sycamore with people By Marty Aligata – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56461629. Tulip tree: By Timothy Valentine – http://www.flickr.com/photos/el_ramon/3583585898/in/set-72157614131871676/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6945589; White pine bough, By DigbyDalton – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=28948041. This story about the tallest trees in New England was updated in 2023.

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The Spanish Sheep Craze That Forever Changed Vermont

In 1809, a man named William Jarvis sent a flock of Spanish sheep to America and altered the landscape and the economy of Vermont. The shipment of prized merino sheep eventually turned Vermont’s subsistence farmers into wealthy ranchers, fed the new woolen mills and deforested the landscape.

William Jarvis

William Jarvis was a Boston Brahmin who built a successful trading house dealing in European commodities. He got to know Lisbon, Portugal, well, and served as Thomas Jefferson’s consul to Portugal from 1802 to 1811.

Spanish Sheep

Jarvis discovered a secret closely guarded by the Spanish: Their merino sheep produced fine, thick wool that was soft, water-resistant and long-fibered.

Merino sheep

When Napoleon invaded Spain, Jarvis took advantage of the resulting chaos and sent thousands of merino sheep out of the country. He was, in a sense, a 19^th century version of Ben & Jerry’s.

He sent a staggering number of sheep to America. According to the Vermont Merino Sheep Breeders Association in 1879, 15,767 merino sheep arrived on the East Coast from Spain from 1810-11. Ships carrying the Spanish sheep arrived in Boston, New Haven, Portland, Providence, New York, Philadelphia and Norfolk. Jarvis even sent eight to Jefferson.

Weathersfield, Vt., around 1900

In 1811, Jarvis bought an estate in Weathersfield, Vt., near his relatives in Claremont, N.H. He brought thousands of sheep, along with Spanish shepherds and dogs to tend them. He evolved into a zealot for the merino sheep, giving speeches, lending money to farmers who wanted to raise them and buying an interest in a woolen mill in Quechee, Vt.

His timing was good. The local production of wool simply couldn’t supply the emerging woolen industry. Farmers had tried and failed to figure out how to improve the breed of sheep. Several others attempted to promote the Spanish sheep, but no one really paid attention.

Then came the economic crisis caused by the Embargo Act of 1807 and the Nonintercourse Act of 1809. Wool factories could no longer buy wool from Britain, and farmers could no longer sell their grain overseas.

A flock of Vermont merinos

Merino Mania

Merino mania then seized Northern New England, especially Vermont. Textile manufacturers paid farmers $2.00 for a pound of merino wool, while common wool sold for 37.5 cents a pound. Common sheep sold for $2, while Merino rams sold for as much as $1,500 each.

Farmers stopped growing wheat and grain and started raising the Spanish sheep. They cut down thousands of acres of trees because the sheep needed the land for grazing.

The craze subsided by 1823. Isaac Holmes wrote, in An Account of the United States of America, derived from actual observation, during a residence of four uears in that Republic; including Original communications,

The sheep or Merino mania has now subsided. Four or five years ago, the sum of 1500 dollars was paid for a ram of the Merino breed. One thousand dollars was a very common price for an animal which would not now sell for fifty.

Boom and Bust

But the Spanish sheep, now known as the Vermont Merino, was here to stay. By 1830, Merino sheep were Vermont’s principal livestock, and Weathersfield was one of the richest towns in New England. The character of the sheep changed, too. In 1812, the average fleece of a Vermont sheep was 6 percent of the animal’s weight. By 1844, the average fleece of a Vermont sheep – with all those Spanish genes — was 15 percent of its weight, and by 1865 it rose to 21 percent.

Over the next decades, sheep farmers were subject to booms and busts. Wool prices plummeted because of competition from huge farms in the western United States, Australia and Argentina. Protective tariffs on wool also declined. Prices fell from 57 cents a pound in 1835 to 25 cents in late 1840, and two-thirds of Vermont’s sheep were killed between 1846 and 1850. Many farmers went out of business.

There were nearly 4 million sheep in New England by 1840, but half as many by 1860.

Civil War

A second wave of Merino mania struck in the 1860s. Cotton was scarce and wool was needed for military uniforms. The sheep population doubled in some places. Some Vermont Merinos rams sold for as much as $5,000. A breeder named George Campbell took his prize Vermont Merinos to Hamburg, Germany, for an agricultural fair in 1863. He brought 12 sheep, the only Americans there, and they beat out 1,761 Merinos, some from the Royal French flock, for two first prizes and one second.

William Jarvis wasn’t alive to witness the second craze for Spanish sheep. He died in 1859 and was buried in Weathersfield. A merino sheep was inscribed on his tombstone.

This story about Spanish sheep last updated in 2023. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the Guernsey cow and her passionate followers here.

Image of Merino ram: By Cgoodwin – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7697403. Flock of merino sheep in snow By Pixture2016 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50266283.

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Cracking the History of the Uncommon Common Cracker

Every so often when you’re looking through a book of old New England recipes, you’ll find one that calls for the common cracker. Well, there are plenty of common crackers around. Saltines come to mind.

But the common crackers these recipes call for are actually a specific type of common cracker. And these days, they’re anything but common.

vermont-common-cracker

If you dropped back in time, say 30 years, you’d know exactly what the recipe needs. Well into the 1970s, the common cracker was ubiquitous throughout New England.

But to get the full picture, you’d need to step back in time a bit further, to the days when fresh bread was not easy to buy and before science took over the business of baking. With preservatives and cellophane and cardboard packaging, today you can commonly eat crackers made anywhere in the world.

But in the early 1800s, that wasn’t the case. Baking science hadn’t evolved so, and the common cracker solved a problem for hungry families needing a staple that would keep for months.

Inventor of the Common Cracker

If you want to figure out who invented the first common cracker, you probably won’t have any luck. They went by many names and many bakers produced them, with small variations in size. The Boston Cracker in Massachusetts, the Portland Cracker in Maine, the Montpelier Cracker in Vermont, and so forth.

American crackers, themselves, first came into existence in Newburyport, Mass. — or so the story goes– in the bakery of Theodore Pearson. There he created pilot biscuits.

Sailors, soldiers, explorers and travelers have carried some variation of cracker with them for centuries, as far back as you can imagine. The Newburyport version of this was called hard tack (among other things).

Hard Tack

Hard tack consists of an unleavened water and flour baked to within an inch of its life. It will last virtually forever. Hard tack produced for the War of 1812 was stored and then brought out for use in the Civil War, for example, none the worse for wear. Soldiers and sailors preferred it only slightly to starvation.

But hard tack soon gave rise (forgive the pun) to more elegant crackers for domestic use. The addition of yeast, a rising period of 24 hours (and more) and a long period of kneading, followed by baking and drying, resulted in a puffy white cracker with a hard thick outer shell. Voila! The common cracker.

Preserved hardtack from U.S. Civil War, Wentworth Museum, Pensacola.

The ingenious yankees had dozens of uses for them. Many involved mashing. They commonly used them as thickeners for soup and chowder or mashed and eaten with milk. Later, they split them, buttered them, toasted them and gave them all sorts of toppings. And when potatoes began to take over the chowder, the crackers shifted to the side for crumbling in just before eating.

The folks at The Food Timeline suggest Artemus Kennedy, a baker in what is now Arlington, Mass., originated the common cracker. Kennedy, their research suggests, began baking the crackers at his bakery founded in 1805. He rode around the nearby country on horseback selling them. But no one knows where he got the idea for them.

Early Bakers

Another early baker who dabbled with the cracker was Josiah Bent, founder of the G.H. Bent company in Milton, Mass., in 1801. The company earned a reputation for making water crackers, which Bent prized for their ability to travel well on sea voyages. Bent’s water crackers are smaller than the common cracker, but he made other products as well. Bent definitely made a lot of hard tack for the government, as did Pearce, and the company revived that recipe for Civil War reenactors a century after the war itself ended.

The G.H Bent factory in Milton, Mass.

Perhaps the best known of the common cracker makers was Charles Cross of Montpelier, Vt., and his tireless horse. Charles and his brother Thomas, originally from New Hampshire, founded Cross Bakers in 1828. The business continuously operated for 151 years, evolving into C.H. Cross & Sons before going bankrupt in 1979. Then the firm and its Cross Crackers moved to Claremont, N.H.

In the early days, Cross used a horse-powered treadmill to run the machinery for his bakery. His horse alternated jobs, one day powering the treadmill, the next hauling crackers for delivery. Over time, Cross grew to have a crew of salesmen traveling throughout New England selling his crackers to stores.

But in his earliest days, Cross packed up the crackers and displayed them in barrels. And this is probably how we most associate with common crackers: stored in a barrel that served as a centerpiece of the country store where they were sold. Visitors to the store would be invited to pull up a seat, crack open a cracker and put a piece of cheese on it. In this setting, men resolved the issues of the day, shared news and settled arguments.

Then the barrels disappeared. And as the humorist John Gould wrote, “everything has been on the skids since the common cracker declined.”

Julia Child

The common cracker had a new lease on life given to it by Julia Child, who gave them her stamp of approval for use with chowder. She became rather famously obsessed with cracking the recipe, which she eventually did.

Should you need a common cracker today, there are two companies still selling them: the aforementioned G.H. Bent, known as the Bent Cookie Factory, which has continuously operated since 1801; and Vermont Common Foods, which wholesales them and has a nice collection of recipes for how to cook with them. The company acquired the Cross cracker equipment, which it uses to make them today.

You can order the Vermont Common Cracker from the Vermont Country Store. Click here. This story was updated in 2021.

Images: GH. Bent Co. By Jameslwoodward – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7907262. Hard tack By Infrogmation of New Orleans – Photo by Infrogmation, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4615956

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