By Karen Berger
The most celebrated resident in Egremont may not be a person. A 150-year-old American elm, anthropomorphically known to locals as “Elma,” has been profiled in the British newspaper the Guardian; photographs of it are archived in the Library of Congress. And even though there are perhaps a million mature trees in Egremont’s approximate 6000 acres of forests (calculated using the USDA Forest Service estimate of 200 larger trees per forested New England acre), if you say “the tree” to an Egremonter, they know which one you mean.
Elma holds court in a field at the junction of the four Baldwin Hill Roads — east, west, north, and south. On the northwest side of the junction is the white Proctor farmhouse juxtaposed against the sharp angles of red barns. A couple of miles west, Catamount Ski Area lights up like an airport on winter nights. Elma’s field, owned by Turner Farms, sits to the southeast, framed by the Jug End ridge and Mt. Everett.
The tree stands alone, surrounded only by straight furrows of corn, or mud, or snow. That isolation – the arboreal version of social distancing — may be why she still rises proudly while most of her peers long ago succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease, an epidemic that arrived in the United States in the 1920s via a Dutch shipment of logs. In a mere 60 years, the beetle-borne fungus killed 75 percent of North America’s 77 million elm trees.
Richard Burdsall, a retired English teacher who grew up on a Baldwin Hill farm, compares Dutch Elm Disease to Europe’s Black Death, which started in the late 1300s. “Whole villages, called plague towns, would get it, and everyone would die, except for perhaps one person who would walk away,” he says. “No one knows why. That’s this elm tree – a survivor.”
According to an 1858 map hanging in Egremont’s Town Hall, Elma’s field was owned by the Kline family, but it was sold to pay poker debts. In the following years, the field was cleared and farmed, but the tree, growing in a hedgerow, was left standing. The field was also used as a charcoal plant, and more trees were cut; still, Elma remained. In 1950, the Turner family rented the field to farm, and in 1993, they bought the property. According to Carla Turner, while aesthetic reasons might have been one reason to leave the tree standing, it also sits fortuitously on a sinkhole that can’t be farmed. So, while blight-infested elm saplings along the hedgerows were cut back and other elms died, Elma remained, spectacularly – and safely – alone.
Baldwin Hill is itself a postcard landscape of farms, fields, and hills. Elma is its focal point, a rare beauty in the center of the vista, its umbrella-like crown supported by twin trunks that rise 90 feet into the sky. “40 years ago, the tree wasn’t as celebrated as now,” Burdsall reflects. “Today, there’s always someone at that junction with their camera out.”
Local resident Mike Mancini is one of them. “In 2018, I was painting the white farmhouse,” he remembers. “She was shrouded in fog. I thought she looked really cool so I took her photo.” The next day, he took another picture, then another. He has now been photographing the tree almost daily for nearly four years. Indeed, photographing Elma is almost a community hobby, with pictures of her framed by sunsets, sunrises, rain and rainbows, snowstorms, fog, autumnal foliage, and perfect Berkshire summer days posted on the town’s Facebook page and in the town’s annual report.
But it is photographer and tree conservationist Tom Zetterstrom whose work is helping Elma thrive in both art and life. Zetterstrom, whose father was an arborist, has combined a lifelong passion for photography and trees; his photographs of Elma have been included in a collection in the Library of Congress. In 1999, he founded Elm Watch, a group that protects elm trees in and around Berkshire County.
“I had preserved the tree in the national archives,” he says. “I wanted to do something to keep it alive here.” Elm Watch has worked with the Nature Conservancy and the Berkshire Natural Resources Council to protect more than 100 heritage elms in Berkshire County, many of which are adopted by local tree companies. The Egremont-based Haupt Tree Company volunteers as Elma’s monitor and maintainer, keeping Dutch Elm Disease at bay by injecting Arbotech into her every three years; the fungicide has a 99 percent success rate in protecting healthy elms.
Why all this work and love for a single tree? Partly it is aesthetics: Egremont Selectman George McGurn, who grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois, remembers being told as a child that his hometown’s Prospect Avenue was the most beautiful street in America because its elms provided a cathedral canopy. “When I graduated high school in ‘62, there was not a single elm left standing,” he says. “So I am grateful for this tree and the care given to maintain it.”
Carla Turner, whose family collaborated with Elm Watch to protect the tree and its field for the future, sees the tree as iconic to both the community and to her family. Her daughter was married in the field with the tree as a backdrop. But she also understands its importance to the wider community. “I see it as representative of the power a single individual can have, to be something special, to stand tall on your own,” she reflects. “You don’t have to be in a group, you don’t have to be like everyone else. I see at is a symbol of hope.”