Admiring the fine and ancient trees in Colonial Williamsburg - still called CW, I was pleased to note - it occurred to me that they would not have had these fine old trees when it was new. So in that way, the restoration is not at all authentic. Williamsburg didn't look like that in 1760. They could not possibly have had 200-year old trees lining the street in an exact row. They would have done what they could, of course to preserve large healthy trees where they could, and some of those would now be growing and spreading in the open instead of close in the forest. But it wouldn't have looked like this.
OTOH, a few of them do actually go back to that time, and so provide a real continuity through the current day, even if they were small trees then and a re big trees now.
I was surprised that I could not find a listing or article about the trees of CW. I found scraps on different sites, but no place where it's all collected together. I would have expected someone to have done that work long before now. But in fact, they just proposed a commission to collect tree data two weeks ago.
1 comment:
AVI, Have you gone to the Yorktown Battlefield? When last there, I was more than impressed and always would take visitors there. There is a huge plantation between CW and Yorktown, can't recall the name, but also worth a look-see. Fortress Monroe (Jefferson Davis was kept there for a while, is also interesting). I ran a 10K run there when I was much younger - circa 1982-3.
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