07/27/2022
Timber Tale #5 – 🪵📖 Often times when we talk about how old something is, in our heads we relate it to some historical event, WWII, Civil War, signing of the Declaration of independence… But I think many of us leave it at that and don’t really think about what a certain region looked like. Take Pittsburgh for instance, which was named after William Pitt, a British statesmen, in 1758 by General John Forbes who was a soldier in the British army, successfully capturing Fort Duquesne from the French. Picture ‘1758 Pittsburgh’ in your head, now look at the picture below. Is that what you had in mind?
So that was ‘1758 Pittsburgh’, let's head east into the suburbs and talk about Plum Boro. Plum was founded as Plum Township in 1788, 30 years after the naming of Pittsburgh. The township was 1 of only 7 in Allegheny County and stretched from the City of Pittsburgh along the Allegheny River to the Westmoreland County Border, and south to what is now North Versaillies. Knowing what Pittsburgh looked like in 1758, and how big of an area Plum Township encompassed, you can image how undeveloped the area was back then. In fact, according to the 1889 History of Allegheny County (which you can view online using Pitt’s Digital library), Pennsylvania describes Plum Township as having "no villages of importance". It further states that Plum Township had a population of 1,446 in 1860. Today, the population of Plum Boro alone is more than 27,000.
The point of all this was purely to paint a picture of what “Plum Boro” looked like back in the early beginnings. Now for the Timber Tale – Last year a white oak was cut down at my church, Living Word of Plum on Elicker Road. The tree was massive, but sadly was dying, and out of safety concerns was dropped. At the base, the tree is oblong, measuring ~51 inches by 39 inches. I counted the rings on the trunk several times, 347 years, which corresponds well to white oak age vs diameter charts. All my preceding discussion was around the forming of Pittsburgh and Plum in the mid-to-late 1700s. At 347 years old, this white oak was germinated ~1675 and was already a mature tree at over 100 years when Plum Township was founded. The world around this tree transformed in ways that is hard to fathom in one lifetime.
I’ll be sawing as much as I can from this tree as there is plenty of good, solid, heartwood left. I hope it lives on for centuries more…
In the YouTube video link below, we work to split the log to lighten the load, as this single 9 foot section is well over 3,500 lbs, and its the 3rd 9 foot section up the tree!
https://youtu.be/WyppdtxivZg
