By Michelle Robbins

Plaques like this one from Washington, DC's memorial planting along Sixteenth Street were affixed near or to the trees.

Memorial Tree Grove Registration Since 9-11 many communities have planted memorial trees or memorial forests as a living tribute to the heroes and victims of the terrorist attack on America. The memorial tree movement in this country was actually born at the end of World War I, when American Forests (then the American Forestry Association) called on individuals and communities nationwide to plant trees in honor of servicemen and women. Thousands of trees were planted--in some places individually, in other places by the hundreds--marked with brass plaques, and registered with American Forests in the pages of its magazine. Unfortunately, as the decades have passed, many of these markers have been lost, stolen or have weathered to the point that theyıre unreadable. Some of the trees have died or been removed. As the trees and their markers became disconnected, so too did the purpose of these memorials. In researching these memorial plantings we found some municipalities unaware of the significance of the trees still lining their boulevards or gracing their courthouses. In an effort to preserve this green bit of American history, American Forests has created this place on its website for communities to re-register their historic trees. Communities wishing to register photos, descriptions, or links can email those to memotree@amfor.org. At this time in our lives, especially, American Forests feels it is important to recognize these long-ago tributes. It is our hope that communities will peruse their records, talk with their oldest citizens, and then find and rededicate or restore these memorials, remembering their original intent, as described in the pages of American Forests magazine more than 80 years ago: "The trees will be, in their very greenness and robust strength, reminders of the youths who gave their vigor to win the big war. . . They will stand as a continual inspiration for the living who look upon them and are sheltered by them from sun and storm."

Some old trees in our public spaces are long-forgotten war memorials. A look back at the movement American Forests helped spawn and how it's evolved over the decades.

Look at the brittle-edged magazine articles about long-ago tree plantings, and you can't help but wonder just what those ceremonies were like. Who gave the speeches, who threw the ceremonial first shovelful of soil, did a local band play? Was anyone crying when names were read from brass markers affixed to the ground by each tree?

The year was 1919 and across the country, garden clubs, schoolchildren, towns, American Legion posts, and families were planting memorial trees. The trees-as American Forests board chairman Charles Lathrop Pack so eloquently put it at the time of the November 11, 1918 armistice-honored "the heroic dead of the Great War" with "a new form of monument-the memorial that lives."

The time was right after the Great War, the one they thought was seared deep enough in the world's conscience that it would never happen again. These men in uniform, women in furs, and little children in their Sunday best probably never imagined that there would be many, many more groves of memorial trees planted as the decades passed.

Although the memorial trees movement took on a life of its own then, Americans have for centuries used trees as a symbol. Throughout our history they have marked rebellions, tallied losses, and celebrated triumphs. From the Liberty Trees that rallied American patriots to the national champion "General Sherman" sequoia, trees have served as a living calendar, leaving for those who know to look for it a picture of our past as clear as any timeline.

Thumb through old issues of American Forests, called American Forestry in the years around World War I, and you'll find page after page of memorial tree planting ceremonies. In one 1919 picture from Cincinnati, a little girl in a white dress and Mary Janes holds an American flag, her ankles pressed tightly together, as she stands next to a "Victory Oak." The accompanying story describes ceremonies like this that were taking place across the country. The girl, third grader Leona G. Van Ness, dedicated a group of memorial trees during her school's ceremony. No explanation why Leona was chosen, but the article said "Miss Annie L. Kinsella informs the Association that the little girl based her talk upon suggestions she found in three copies of American Forestry."

The same issue described the dedication of a Grove of Heroes in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, with hundreds of Wreaths of Remembrance gathered from towns and cities across California and laid on an obelisk by the Daughters of the Golden West. Then "the citizens joined in the biggest Community Sing the city had ever heard."

In Cleveland, the idea of remembering the dead with a living tribute seems to have been embraced even earlier than Pack's suggestion. In August of that year a small article titled "Trees for the Dead" described Cleveland's plans for a "Liberty Row" boulevard.

"There will be an oak tree planted there for each Clevelander who makes the supreme sacrifice. It will bear a bronze tablet inscribed with this name and military record. The planting of the trees will be made a civic ceremony, in which the relatives of each hero will participate."

The subsequent memorial began at Lake Erie and ran through the cities of Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, and Shaker Heights. A July 7, 1918, article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer quoted councilman Jerry R. Zmunt as saying, "This is a splendid way of honoring our boys. It is particularly fitting that one of our finest boulevards in the city be chosen. The naming of trees after our dead heroes is the best tribute we can pay them, and their names will thus be perpetuated in a living thing."

The American Forestry article applauded the idea, saying "The trees will be, in their very greenness and robust strength, reminders of the youths who gave their vigor to win the big war. There will be no gloom about them. They will stand as a continual inspiration for the living who look upon them and are sheltered by them from sun and storm." American Forestry then urged other cities nationwide to follow suit.

Now, the Cleveland Cultural Garden Federation is heading up an effort to bring back this 7-mile piece of the city's past. Working with two local metal-detecting clubs, its Liberty Row Committee was able to survey two miles of the memorial road for trees and plaques before the snows began, says project coordinator Claire Kovacs. She says she found many of the approximately 262 trees still there, although some are no longer in good health. But far fewer remain of the medallions that marked each tree with the name of a hometown son lost to war. Of the 262, Kovacs says, about 35 or 40 were usable, 65 were unusable, and 162 were missing.

The Liberty Row Committee is now looking for funding to pay for replacing dead or dying trees and concrete to replace the memorial plaques, as well as perhaps money for some larger signs to announce the grove. Its goal is to have the program completed by spring 2004.

The tragic events of 9-11 turned many Americans on to the idea of planting memorial trees. Many probably had no idea that the gesture is a time-worn one; unfortunately, many of those World War I memorials have been lost to time, the trees dead or uprooted, the brass plaques that marked them lost or filed away.

At Georgetown University in Washington, DC, historic records are all that remain of 54 Lombardy poplars planted there by the graduating class of 1919 to honor alumni who died in the war. Oddly enough, a year later, when the school took steps to replace one of the trees that had died, it learned that 53 memorial trees was actually just right-one of the 54 alumni previously thought dead was still alive.

Elsewhere in Washington, American Legion Post 21 became one of the first in the nation to act on the memorial tree idea, placing a maple and a bronze marker on the grounds of the Walter Reed U.S.A. General Hospital. Along the city's Sixteenth Street, the American Legion planted 507 trees, each with a bronze plaque honoring the life of a man or woman from the District who died in WWI.

A May 31, 1920, Washington Herald article described the cermony this way: "For almost three miles, on both sides of Sixteenth street, from the north line of Webster street to Alaska avenue, the long line of sturdy saplings stand as an army in double file, looking to the north where stands their leader, the beautiful maple dedicated to Edward D. Adams, the first of the comrades to fall."

In 2002, local Girl Scouts joined American Forests and the American Legion to tie ribbons around the remaining Sixteenth Street trees for Memorial Day. Although some of those original trees remain, after years of neglect and vandalism, only two of the plaques are still readable.

Roads like the one in Washington were planted across the nation. Formally called Roads of Remembrance, they were another way to add beauty while very publicly paying tribute to war dead or war veterans.

Even President Warren G. Harding and First Lady Florence Harding became involved. In May of 1921 President Harding issued a statement in response to a request from the Chicago Tribune, which enthusiastically supported the memorial trees idea.

First Lady Florence Harding with the trowel she used to help American Forests with memorial plantings. Bottom, American Forests VP Karen Fedor holds the trowel during a visit to Washington's Sixteenth Street memorial grove.

"I find myself altogether responsive to your request for an appeal to the people to plant memorial trees along the important public highways as memorials to the men who were sacrificed in the World War, and, indeed, also to those who gave their service without the ultimate sacrifice," Harding wrote. "It would be not only the testimony of our sentiments, but a means to beautify the country which these heroes have so well served.

"A general adoption of this plan would, in the coming years, be noted as one of the useful and beautiful ideas which our soldiers brought back from France."

Harding also put his muscle behind his words; a photo in the magazine showed him shoveling earth around a memorial tree planted in New York City's Central Park. Mrs. Harding was a guest at American Forests tree plantings. A director of the organization, she presented a tree from the state of Ohio to American Forests and planted it along a "miniature roadway" outside the organization's Washington headquarters. Tiny trees from each state were planted for passers-by to see.

American Forestry magazine honored war dead with a "National Honor Roll, Memorial Trees." Issues included in tiny type the names of the person or group planting trees and the names of those for whom they were planted.

In Arkadelphia, Arkansas, one of the more interesting plantings, a "Liberty Tree" maple, is gone now, possibly lost in a recent tornado that demolished the county courthouse on whose grounds the tree stood. The maple's roots were covered with soil gathered from "every State in the Union, from each of the Allied Countries and from other foreign places," including Izabella, at Santo Domingo, West India, the oldest settlement in the New World; from near a statue on the Capitol Grounds of Bismark, North Dakota, that honored Sakakawea, the guide for the Lewis and Clark expedition; under the old North Bridge at Concord; and from Tilloloy, France, which was near Paris and was destroyed in the war." American Forestry said.

In Portland, Maine, they still proudly point to Baxter Boulevard, where 400 linden trees were planted in 1921 as a memorial to World War I vets. The row of trees fulfills a design by the famed landscape architects the Olmstead Brothers in 1905.

At a time when the country is grieving, as happened after 9-11, the idea of planting a tree remains as simple and rich as that original call to action. In communities small and large, trees and groves represent a living tribute to those who have died in the wars since 1919.

More than 5,000 acres of redwood forest in California was dedicated in 1945 as the National Tribute Grove to WWII.

Toward the end of World War II, American Forests endorsed a slightly different form of memorial, a living memorial forest. "Such projects have the peculiar merit of flexibility; they may simply be groves of trees, or they may contain such special features as playgrounds, refreshment centers, and memorial structures. A forest may belong to a community or to an individual or a family, and as such, may commemorate the regard held for a hundred citizens, or for a son or brother."

In 1945, American Forests published a "step-by-step" guide to planning and maintaining a memorial forest. The sketch of a suggested plan, which appeared in the November magazine, included a section of forest for a youth camp, wildlife sanctuary, memorial grove and amphitheater, thinning operations, athletic field, nature trail, and a clubhouse and administration building.

Blue Star Memorial Highways, initiated by the National Council of State Garden Clubs with help from state highway departments were seen as another way to honor those serving in World War II. The idea originated in New Jersey in 1944 with a "naturalistic planting of flowering dogwood along U.S. Route 22 between Mountainside and North Plainfield-a tree for every New Jersey member of the armed services."

In other states, a May 1947 article in American Forests magazine said, the look of the memorial might be different: roadsides, sylvan dells, memorial forests, horticultural study areas, bird sanctuaries.

As time passed and America became involved in other wars, the idea of memorials continued. Porterville, California, bears some of the most public scars from the Vietnam War. With the highest number of deaths per capita of any city in the U.S.-the average age of those killed was 22.4, said city employee Gil Meachum-it remembers its losses through a living memorial of 28 giant sequoias framing a Huey helicopter held aloft. The sequoias, planted in the 1980s, were given plaques with the names of the war dead as an Eagle Scout project in 1996. The city maintains the 20- to 30-foot trees and Veterans Park; veterans maintain the helicopter. "It is a special place," Meachum writes. In Scarsdale, New York, the American Legion Memorial Garden has an admirable pedigree. Sheltered by towering trees planted in the name of fallen soldiers from World War II, it stands along Mamaroneck Road, a route used by George Washington's troops during the Revolutionary War.

The U.S. Forest Service's Memorial Projects site-where locales go to register their memorials to the victims of 9/11-describes the American Legion Memorial Garden as offering "a unique healing design with a winding path that enables the visitor to reflect in a peaceful setting. Private enclaves shelter individual handcrafted monuments depicting each American war experience."

After September 11, the nation groped for a way to express its sorrow. The idea of planting memorial trees emerged again. American Forests established a plan to plant one tree for each of the heroes and victims in their respective locations: New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. The memorials are being planted with the assistance of retailer Eddie Bauer. The New York Yankees also joined in the effort, accepting the first of the New York trees for planting at Yankee Stadium. American Forests will also provide the trees for a recently announced memorial at the Pentagon.

The idea of forested memorials comes full circle in San Francisco, where in 1996 the city planted a second memorial in Golden Gate Park to pay homage to the suffering of many. The first planting was its 1919 Heroes Grove for the soldiers of World War I. The second grove was established by Congress and the President as the National AIDS Memorial Grove, a place of sorrow and solace for anyone touched by the disease.

In the end, it is what tree memorials are meant to do-comfort us with their beauty, give us hope through their longevity and allow us a quiet place to grieve. AF

Michelle Robbins is editor of American Forests. [TOP]