Where Are the Last of Maine’s Historic King Pines?
Where Are the Last of Maine’s Historic King Pines?
Deep in the wilderness, some say, forest giants claimed by the British Crown still tower above lesser trees.
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ON A BRIGHT, BUGGY JUNE day, I set off across a Maine river into a preserve called The Hermitage. I was in search of a pine tree claimed by the king of England centuries ago. Snow, mud, and raging water make the preserve impassable at different times of the year, but in early summer the river reached just above my ankle. Ahead of me, on the river’s north bank, sloped a stand of tangled beech, sugar maple, and hemlock—and then, rising above the understory, the straight mud-brown trunks of eastern white pines, crowned by ragged branches at their peaks. These were big trees, ancient trees, more than 120 feet tall, the kind you don’t expect to see on the logging-decimated East Coast.
It was Jeff McCarthy, a roofer who grew up here in north-central Maine, who first told me that I should come here to look for the last king pines, trees that were marked by surveyors for the king centuries ago.
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When wars cut off British access to the Baltic region in the 1650s, the king turned in earnest to the forests of the New World. He appointed a surveyor general, who directed laborers to tramp into the woods and mark all trees with a diameter over 24 inches with a “broad arrow,” the official mark to denote the king’s property, made with three blows of a hatchet. This history is indicative of all-encompassing British claims of ownership of the land that belonged to Native people, says Mark Berry, strategic leader for the Maine Nature Conservancy’s forest conservation initiatives. Lumbermen hustled these so-called “sticks” down rivers and onto special, longer-decked boats to carry them across the sea. If you were not one of the king’s men, cutting down one of these trees would incur a hefty penalty—a fact that fomented discontent among colonists in the years leading up to the Revolution. Some New Englanders felled the king pines illegally and then spirited them through their sawmills to hide the evidence; according to Carlton, if you look under the roofs of many colonial houses, you’ll see boards cut at 23 inches, just under the dimension that would reveal they came from a tree claimed by the king.
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https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/king-pines-maine
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