Elms on the Rebound

Once upon a time, Connecticut towns and cities were graced by hundreds, even thousands, of American elm trees. By the second half of the 19th century elms had become a defining characteristic of New England villages, their gracefully drooping branches making the streets sheltered, but still open and inviting, corridors of space. Invariably they inspired visitors’ comments; as one Rhode Island resident remembered, “When you came into any town in New England the landscape changed; you entered this kind of forest with 100-foot arches. The shadows changed. Everything seemed very reverent, there was a certain serenity, a certain calmness… a sweetness in the air. It was an otherworldly experience, you knew you were entering an almost sacred place.”

 It wasn’t always so. For the first European settlers, trees were obstacles to be removed before they could build towns, graze animals, or plant crops. Only at the end of the 18th century, after the initial clearing had been accomplished and Romanticism inspired a new attitude toward Nature as nurturer rather than opponent, did New Englanders begin planting trees for ornament. It began with public-spirited individuals such as James Hillhouse of New Haven, who initiated efforts to plant trees on the New Haven Green and then throughout the city (actually planting many of them himself, according to legend). By mid-century, village improvement societies throughout the region had taken up the cause, incorporating tree-planting in their improvement programs.  

Some of these early trees were living memorials, including the Franklin Elm in New Haven, planted to commemorate Benjamin Franklin’s death, or the thirteen sycamores that Oliver Wolcott planted in Litchfield in 1779 to honor the thirteen states. But the predominant motivation was beautification. Elms quickly became the favorite variety. They were hardy and fast-growing, and their high branches and light foliage cast a dappled shade that was soothing rather than gloomy. Their form appealed to romantic taste because it suggested Gothic arches; writer after writer claimed that tree-lined streets were the American equivalent of Europe’s cathedrals. The poet Nathaniel Parker Willis called the elms of New Haven “an unhewn cathedral, in whose choirs/ Breezes and storm-winds, and the many birds/ Join’d in the varied anthem.” By the 1840s New Haven was known as the “Elm City” for its trees. There were so many that Willis wrote in 1837 that the city “…has the appearance of a town roofed in with leaves.”

Towns and cities all across New England followed New Haven’s lead; in some, elms eventually represented as much as 75 percent of all street trees. Unfortunately, this enthusiasm hastened the trees’ destruction. While long streets planted with only a single species were visually coherent, by the late 19th century they were already proving vulnerable to pests.

In the 20th century this vulnerability became a disaster with the invasion of the Dutch elm disease, a fungal infection spread by beetles that burrow in the trees’ bark. Unwittingly introduced to the United States in packing cases, the disease first appeared in Ohio in 1931 and reached Connecticut only two years later. The blight quickly outpaced efforts to remove infected trees and was gaining the upper hand even before the great hurricane of 1938 destroyed thousands of trees, leaving huge piles of dead timber that proved a perfect breeding ground for the beetles. As the blight continued to spread, even widespread application of DDT could not stop the beetles, though it aggravated the environmental havoc.

By the 1950s New England’s elms were decimated, and by the ‘60s, scarcely any remained. More than just a loss of the trees themselves, the death of the elms seemed to stand for broader upheavals of the time. Historian Thomas Campanella writes that the blight “…coincided with some of the most difficult urban and social transformations of the 20th century. This was an era of racial discord and urban rebellion, of ill-conceived urban renewal projects and highway-building schemes that gutted stable older neighborhoods across the region—many of which had been rich in elm shade. The passing of the elm also coincided with the great postwar exodus of the white middle class to suburbia, a migration that brought about the precipitous decline of many New England cities… And through all this the elms came crashing down, laying waste, it seemed, the glory and essence of Yankee urbanism.”

A few elms survived, thanks to isolated location or natural resistance, and gradually citizens began efforts to preserve and restore the historic treescapes by protecting existing elms, breeding disease-resistant varieties, and promoting the planting of new elms. One organization, the Elm Research Institute, founded in 1967, pioneered the use of fungicide injections to protect existing elms and developed a series of disease-resistant cultivars under the name “American Liberty.”

Tom Zetterstrom, a photographer who lives in North Canaan, has dedicated much of his time to elms in northwestern Connecticut and western Massachusetts. In 1999, Zetterstrom launched an organization called Elm Watch to protect existing elms in the region and promote planting new ones. Elm Watch’s preservation and restoration programs include:

• creating an inventory of elms in the Housatonic region of Massachusetts and Connecticut;

• an Adopt-an-Elm program, sponsoring injections of preventive fungicide into existing elms; and

• promoting the planting of disease-resistant cultivars and elm hybrids.

Municipalities and local organizations have taken on elm programs as well. In New Haven, the New Haven Garden Club and the city parks department have worked to protect elms growing on the New Haven Green, where the garden club sponsored the planting of Liberty elms beginning in 1984. More elms were planted in the city in 1988 by Boy Scouts and the Rotary Club, and in the late 1990s when Broadway was redesigned.

In Farmington, the Farmington Historical Society has planted more than 20 elms throughout the town center beginning in 2001, including two in front of its headquarters, the Gridley-Case cottages. The project has since been expanded to Unionville, another village in the town.

As in the late 18th century, some trees serve commemorative purposes: In Salisbury, an elm was planted in 2002 as a memorial to Susan Getzendanner, a resident who died in the World Trade Center.

Elms will never again become the predominant ornament of Connecticut and New England landscapes—the cost of care and the hazards of monoculture argue against that. But with the work of groups around the state, survivors will continue to grace the landscape and the trees may once again play a prominent role in shaping the region’s character.

PHOTOGRAPH credit: courtesy of Elizabeth Mills Brown