The Moses Cleaveland Trees

This Old Tree with Doug Still
The Moses Cleaveland Trees (Transcript)
Season 1, Episode 16
Published May 26, 2023


[Music]

Doug Still  00:05
The year was 1796. A group of surveyors from Connecticut had come to the frontier, just west of Pennsylvania to choose locations for new settlements. Their intent was to map the area south of Lake Erie and create a rough plan in order to sell lots to settlers back in New England. The survey group, led by Moses Cleveland, selected one site at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River that eventually took on his name. When Cleveland and his band arrived, they found a beech-maple forest rich with towering Oaks, Chestnut, Elm and Sycamore. Over time, as Cleveland and the surrounding townships grew, the forest was largely cleared. Flash forward to 1946 when the city of Cleveland was set to celebrate its 150 year anniversary, its sesquicentennial. Arthur Williams was a curator at the Museum of Natural History, and an ecologist with the Cleveland Metropolitan Park Board. And he had an idea to honor the founding of Cleveland. Why not find 150 trees that were alive and sizable back in 1796, thus more than 150 years old, and designate them as heritage trees? And that's exactly what he did. With help and some good PR, he found them, 153 of them actually, dotted throughout Cuyahoga County. They were named the Moses Cleveland trees, and each was initiated with a plaque upon its trunk. The project got a lot of attention that year, and afterward, Arthur Williams hoped the trees would continue to inspire people as living links to the past. But, you know how things go. Would this hallowed group of old trees become lost to time, development, and a changing modern world? 

[music]

Join me as I meet some members of a larger team that recently set out to find all these trees and map their locations. My guests Roy Larick, Margeaux Apple, and Michael Melampy are here to describe their tracking efforts and door knocking diplomacy. What did they learn about the Moses Cleveland trees? And Will their historical legacy survive? I'm Doug Still and this is, This Old Tree.

[This Old Tree theme music]


While I usually center my stories around the symbolism of a single old tree, I've got to say, designating a collection of heritage trees with a shared name and identity seems like a brilliant idea. As a group, these arboreal veterans have an extra aura, like they are part of an exclusive club. The upside is that they are appreciated across neighborhoods, with special pride shared among residents and landowners. But that regional distribution is also the group's downside, as some trees are more vulnerable to the whims and priorities of any individual landowner, as well as to the lack of any coordinated care. Some just get forgotten. Finding them again is like reuniting them in a way, bringing back their collective power and identity. There's something really cool about that. It makes me think of the Blues Brothers movie when Jake and Elwood spread out across Chicago to find their old wayward bandmates in order to get the group back together. These Moses Cleveland trees are forever linked. The chief organizer of the project was Roy Larick, a retired archaeologist with a second career in watershed science and advocacy consulting with Blue Stone Conservation. He was a Paleolithic archaeologist as a matter of fact, and I asked him what that means.

Roy Larick  04:17
And that means basically, it's got to be older than 11,000 years. It has to be part of the ice age. And so, and of the Pleistocene, by convention, 11,300 or something like that. And if it's later than that, it is, no, it's not in my expertise basically.

Doug Still  04:37
It's too new. 

Roy Larick  04:38
Yeah. Too new, right. 

Doug Still  04:40
Where are some of the places you've worked?

Roy Larick  04:43
I have worked in southwest Europe, so France and Spain, a little bit in England, and a tiny bit in Italy, but France and Spain basically. And I have had the great fortune of being part of excavation teams for a number of sites in southwest France, cave sites that date anywhere from 450,000 years ago to 11,300.

Doug Still  05:12
But what brings you to trees?

Roy Larick  05:15
Trees represent, for me, the most basic ecology that develops on top of a substrate; on top of either bedrock, or in the case of Northeast Ohio, glacial deposits. And they are, to my mind, the equivalent of… the floral equivalent of megafauna that I have dealt with as an archaeologist.

Doug Still  05:40
He pointed to his appreciation of a book written by Jared Farmer called Elderflora: A Modern History of Ancient Trees, published in 2022. It's an intellectual examination of how the world's oldest trees symbolize the best and worst of modern civilization, as it says in the book jacket. I went and got a copy.

Roy Larick  06:01
For me, the trees are… their elderflora. They represent, you know, the basic ecological associations, regional ecological associations that I can understand, and most people can understand as well. So trees are the … trees are the ecology, the basic ecology on top of the bedrock.

Doug Still  06:25
I see. When did you first become aware of the Moses Cleveland trees?

Roy Larick  06:30
Clevelanders are generally aware of what we call Moses Cleveland trees, at least of a certain generation here. So the first Moses Cleveland trees were designated in 1946, and I'm a child of the ‘50s and ‘60s, so this was a term that you get taught, you tend to know if you're a Clevelander. My direct association with them goes back to 2019, when a friend slash colleague of mine, Bill Barrow (William Barrow) of Cleveland State University Special Collections, retired and became the president of the early settlers association of the Western Reserve. And that organization had taken up the Moses Cleveland trees in 1970, or ‘71, and had worked with them until 1986. And Bill Barrow inherited a number of files that were labeled Moses Cleveland trees, he didn't know what to do with them, and he asked me, as the most science oriented person he knows, to look through these files and tell him what they were about, basically… what the value was.

Doug Still  07:40
So he brought this list to you. I'd love to get back to it, but I'd like to go back in time first. 

Roy Larick  07:48
Okay. 

Doug Still  07:49
…and ask you: who was Moses Cleveland?

Roy Larick  07:52
Moses Cleveland was a resident of Connecticut back in the Revolutionary War era. He had been a general in the US Army and had retired as a rather wealthy man, I believe… at least he became so. And he was part of this group called the Connecticut Land Company, which had put together, back in 1795, about $3 million to purchase what Connecticut called its Western Reserve, that had been given to the state by US Congress in 1786. And the state of Connecticut sat on this for eight or nine years, till they sold it to this land company. Moses Cleveland was a principal in that company and he was hired as the chief surveyor. 

Doug Still  08:46
So he was from Connecticut. 

Roy Larick  08:48
He was from Connecticut. Right. And Glastonbury, I believe. So he assembled, in the winter of 1795 - ‘96, 55 people. Some of them were trained surveyors, many more had other skills like hunting, and they were the petitioners for the group. There were all kinds of people who had several jobs: ax men… ax men and chain men, who cut down trees and the like. In any event, this was a major push during the summer of 1796, to come to the western border of Pennsylvania, and survey an area that was 120 miles long (that is, from east to west) and about 50 miles deep from Lake Erie down to a southern border. And it was basically…Connecticut got the right to double itself, west of Pennsylvania. There were, of course, Native Americans here. Not a great presence because this was a buffer zone between Heron speakers in the northwest and Iroquoian speakers to the east. So … each of those groups’ influence trailed out in this area along the Cuyahoga River. So it was basically without permanent Native American settlements, but a lot of travel across the area.

Doug Still  10:14
Who were the indigenous tribes?

Roy Larick  10:16
Well, it would have been the… the Wyandot was a principal one. There were Ottawa’s, there were Shawnee, and there were… right along the Pennsylvania border there were Iroquois: Seneca Iroquois.

Doug Still  10:36
So it was sort of an overlapping jurisdiction right where the Cleveland settlement began.

Roy Larick  10:42
That's right. And to the south of this area… so to the south of the Lake Erie drainage and the Tuscarawas drainage, there were settlements. And for that reason, there were missionaries here. And there had been French missionaries earlier. And they… there was a group of Moravian missionaries in the Muskingum Watershed, and they had some dealings here, you know, there was a small presence.

Doug Still  11:09
I see. How did these tribes respond to the survey group that came from Connecticut?

Roy Larick  11:15
They did encounter some Native Americans and they sent word out that they would be arriving to what's now called Conneaut, Ohio, the northeastern most settlement in Ohio. And they spent some days there negotiating with a small group, I think less than a dozen Native Americans. And they came to one of these ridiculous kinds of contracts, where for just, you know, a few score dollars in cash, and some tools, some, what we would call, trinkets these days, and some whiskey - some barrels of whiskey -, they would obtain this area, at least from the Pennsylvania line to the Cuyahoga River.

Doug Still  12:03
And so what did Moses Cleveland and his team do once they got to this spot? Like how did they select this one spot?

Roy Larick  12:11
The Moses Cleveland and some of the principles had taken a land traverse from Connecticut, across New York, and into the little bit of Pennsylvania that sticks up to Lake Erie. And they… this is where they set up … this conference, series of conferences, but most of the group and all of the supplies came by boat from Irondequoit Bay, actually, or just Sodus, New York. And so they had to traverse their boats up around Niagara Falls and into Lake Erie, and they met at Conneaut. There was a major storm on Lake Ontario when these boats were coming. And the boat that held the barrels of whiskey foundered, and they lost a lot of their daily grog ration.

Doug Still  13:08
Aw man! 

[both Doug and Roy laugh]

So they were not happy.

Roy Larick  13:12
They were not happy. It was like a military enlistment and part of it was a ration.

Doug Still  13:17
What was the forest like when they got there? Because obviously, some of these trees, that we're about to talk about, were there.

Roy Larick  13:26
You know, we know it as basically a beech maple forest region wide. And it's an extension from New England, across Northern New York and into this area, and it actually goes into Michigan, and I think goes up to Wisconsin a little bit. So beech was the principal tree, sugar maple was second, but it was varied, and especially by terrain. So in the higher, more humid areas, beech and sugar maple dominated. On the slopes where it was a bit drier, oaks dominated. And then in the swamps, there was a combination of swamp white oak and pin oak that tended… and Elm and chestnut, which are gone entirely. Yeah.

Doug Still  14:14
Was it a closed canopy forest? Or were there open areas that might have been cleared?

Roy Larick  14:20
It was a closed canopy, I think we can say that. There has been some argument about this, that there were… that this area is the southernmost point of the northern forest, It's the western most most point of the Eastern forest, and conversely, it's the easternmost extension of the prairie, the Tallgrass prairie. So there had been arguments that there were isolated prairies, and that, upon review, that doesn't seem to be the case.

Doug Still  14:53
So then the survey team finished up by the end of September?

Roy Larick  14:57
Yes. 

Doug Still  14:58
And then they went back to Connecticut. 

Roy Larick  15:00
Yes.

Doug Still  15:00
Then what’d they do?

Roy Larick  15:02
They wrote everything up, and they graded the townships, that is, better to worse. And then the Connecticut Land Company took over and formed basically blocks of land to sell, that would have nicer and lesser townships with them. And everybody got a share, basically. And then they hired agents to actually sell land back in New England and out here, in the frontier.

[music]

Doug Still  15:33
When did the city or town of Cleveland take its name?


Roy Larick  15:36
Right then and there.

Doug Still  15:39
We are going to take a quick break. When we come back, Moses Cleveland Tree Project leader, Roy Larick, describes how the original heritage tree effort came about in 1946. I'm Doug Still, and you're listening to This Old Tree. 

[music]

The sesquicentennial, which is a word that I just learned, thanks to researching this. How do trees become involved in that idea?

Roy Larick  16:23
There was a large celebration. And there were a couple of aspects to it. So, Cleveland is 150 years old. For a New Englander that doesn't sound so old, but at the time, it was, you know, much more than a century. It was going to be the first really large celebration, and I think that a lot of this celebration had to do with the end of World War II. It was just a year after the war had formally ended, and the economy was just starting to grow. People were beginning to feel good about this area, which had certainly developed industrially a number of times, very early on. But the war effort – the World War II effort – meant a lot of manufacturing, for armaments, and machines of various sorts. Okay, so there was wealth here, and there was a good feeling. There was a committee, a Sesquicentennial committee. And I don't know how they got in contact with Arthur B. Williams of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, the forest ecologist there, but there arose this effort on the part of Arthur Williams to identify 150 trees that would have been present when Moses Cleveland was there. So they wouldn't have been seedlings or even saplings, they would have been decent trees, so they would be more than 150 years old. And as a forest ecologist, he wanted to see the range of forest species represented in this group of 150 trees. So he took over and there were other ecologists, our Metroparks – our Cleveland Metroparks – is a very large organization that, back in the 1910s, began to establish hundreds and hundreds of acres of reservations. Okay? so the chief naturalist from that organization aided in this. And once again, it was Arthur Williams’ idea to go out and get as many species of 150 year old trees as was possible, and they ended up with 23. And some of them really aren't trees that grow that long in the forest. But they still were picked and Arthur Williams knew himself … that by the end of the sesquicentennial year, that some of these trees that were in pretty poor shape, still old, might be gone. So they did identify – designate – 153, just to make sure there would be 150 at the end of the year.

Doug Still  19:05
So they had 23 different species. What are some of the species that they chose?

Roy Larick  19:10
The dominant ones are the oaks, which tend to be the longest lived around here. So, white oak, swamp white oak, bur oak, various red oaks, black oak included, and sugar maples were quite represented because that is a dominant tree, beeches, yes, although by that time beeches were having problems due to urban disturbance. I’ll backup to say that the… one of the more important things about these Moses Cleveland trees is that Arthur Williams wanted them to be either on public ways or quite visible from them. Okay? So that means that trees like beech, that are sensitive to root disturbance, were not often found next to public ways. Oaks tend to be more resistant to disturbance, especially certain ones. Hickories were pretty well represented. Several cucumber magnolias, getting down to the trees that are present in the native forests but never really numerous. 
Doug Still  20:16
Now there's a sycamore that I read about.

Roy Larick  20:18
Sycamore, right. Sycamore is a good one. Sycamores, I think there would have been more, except not too many are located near public ways because the public ways don't go through floodplains, which is the sycamores preferred habitat. Typically the Moses Cleveland trees were indeed forest trees in 1796. But the classic Moses Cleveland trees are those that the early settlers saw in the forest as nice trees and they cleared around them. They left them in open areas.

Doug Still  20:49
So who was choosing the trees in 1946?

Roy Larick  20:52
It was Arthur Williams and a man named Harold Wallen, who was the chief naturalist for the Metroparks. They were in charge of it. The way they did this was to send letters to mayors of municipalities throughout Cuyahoga County to ask residents or knowledgeable people anyway, to identify trees.

Doug Still  21:16
So the Moses Cleveland trees are not just in Cleveland.

Roy Larick  21:19
Cuyahoga County.

Doug Still  21:21
Once they selected the trees, what did they do next? 

Roy Larick  21:25
They… each one was personally visited by Arthur Williams, who wrote a description. Unfortunately, not locating it as precisely as one would like 75 years later.

Doug Still  21:39
Right. 

[Doug Still chuckles]

And do you have those descriptions in that file you were talking about? 

Roy Larick  21:46
Yes, we have those descriptions. 

Doug Still  21:48
And you have them in your collection, or…?

Roy Larick  21:51
They are archived at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Doug Still  21:55
And they included a plaque with each tree, right?

Roy Larick  21:59
That's right. A plaque that was made of aluminum, about six by eight inches, just slightly rectangular. And it had the standard Moses Cleveland tree Sesquicentennial, city of Cleveland 1796 to 1946, and then the species name of the tree.

Doug Still  22:26
So there was sort of a select group of people that were part of this quote, unquote, Moses Cleveland tree club. 

Roy Larick  21:34
That's right. 

Doug Still  22:35
And people, you know, a homeowner would say, “Oh, I've got a Moses Cleveland tree. I've got the plaque right here.”

Roy Larick  22:41
Yes. Oh, after the fact. That's right. Most people, still to this day, are proud of a Moses Cleveland tree on their land.

Doug Still  22:50
So there are 150 original trees, plus three to make sure that they kept the number at 150. 

Roy Larick  22:57
That's right. 

Doug Still  22:58
The number was added to over the years. 

Roy Larick  23:00
Yes, it was. 

Doug Still  23:02
How did that occur?

Roy Larick  23:04
Arthur Williams, at the end, was probably tired of this. He retired about three years later, never having done much more with the Moses Cleveland trees, except to putting a few in his magnum opus, which is called, The Native Forest of Cuyahoga County. He retired right after finishing that book in 1949, and then the museum itself lost interest entirely. So nothing was done with the Moses Cleveland trees from, let's say, 1946 to about 1970, when, this group I’ve already mentioned, the early settlers association of the Western Reserve got interested.

Doug Still  23:48
That's who you belong to, right? 


Roy Larick  23:50
Yes, I was recruited into this group after I got an interest in the trees myself. 

Doug Still  23:55
Mmhm.

Roy Larick  23:56
So in 1970, they thought that they should inventory all 153 sites, to see what was still around. They did, and this time around, it was not specialists. Okay? The knowledge involved, the forests of trees, was, I want to say, more limited. But they did go out and find the sites and at least determine whether the tree was there, if it was gone, when it had gone, under what conditions. And they brought this back, and they found, I think it was 92 trees, still surviving from this original 153. And they sat on this for some months or a year, and then decided that they should continue the program of designating most Cleveland trees. And so over, actually the next 30 years, yeah, I'm sorry, 20 years, they then sent out various groups to do several score at a time. And eventually, by 1986, they had added another 143.

Doug Still  25:11
I see. So it was sort of a slow moving project that added trees over time. 

Roy Larick  25:16
That's right. There were bursts, you know? And the big burst came in 1976, the bicentennial of the country. And the biggest push, I think there were 100 trees actually designated in 1975, 1976.

Doug Still  25:33
the mid-‘80s then…? 

Roy Larick  25:35
The mid-’80s, once again… what happens with these organizations, you know, the leader retires, and the interest wanes, and that's what happens here.

Doug Still  25:48
Although the Early Settlers Association published about these trees in two separate publications over the years, the project was largely dropped until 2019. President Bill Barrow handed off the stack of jumbled files to Roy, and his inner archaeologist, naturalist and community organizer took over. The Moses Cleveland Tree Project was revived. In fact, he connected with a group already interested in the project, the Forest City working group, organized by Sustainable Cleveland, a program with the Mayor's Office of Sustainability. The Forest City working group grew out of an action item in the city's 2015 Cleveland tree plan, an expansive master plan for the urban forest. It included an idea to create a landmark tree program and the Moses Cleveland Tree Project was suggested to be a good place to start. Cathi Lehn is Cleveland’s sustainability manager, and with Forest City Working Group co-chair Courtney Blaschke, she had already started a fledgling effort. Roy joined in and helped lead the effort during the early years of COVID lockdown.

Roy Larick  26:57
The common point there was the 225’th anniversary of the city of Cleveland, which has a terrible Latin name for that. I can't tell you…

Doug Still  27:08
I can only imagine. 

[Doug and Roy laugh]

Roy Larick  27:10
Yes, it's twice as long as “sesquicentennial”. And…so there was this common interest that this anniversary was coming up. And the sentiment with the Forest City Working Group and the Early Settlers was that this was the time to re-inventory these trees because they were falling.

Doug Still  27:30
a concern for these oldest trees and the trees cities canopy in general.

Roy Larick  27:35
And that, yes, that's right. This all ties in with a renewed interest in trees around the world, I think, certainly in this country. And in Northeast Ohio in the urban areas, urban canopy has dropped considerably since 1946, in particular.

Doug Still  27:55
According to the 2015 Cleveland tree plan, the city had lost about half its tree canopy since the 1950s. When viewed from above, the canopy cover was only 18%, a low number relative to other cities and less than 1/5 of what is possible. The city had been losing about 75 acres of trees annually. And while Cleveland represents less than 20% of Cuyahoga County's area, the broader picture is much the same. In the 2010s, the county lost more than 10 square miles of tree canopy, even as communities tried to build it back. The master plan expressed great urgency and the need for awareness and action.

Margeaux Apple  28:36
When they started talking about the Moses Cleveland trees. And the idea of inventorying them, I'm like, this is an amazing project. I am there! It's a treasure hunt for like the biggest oldest trees in Cleveland, like absolutely!

[music]

Doug Still  28:51
That was Margeaux Apple, one of the inventory volunteers. When we come back from the break, we'll hear from her and another volunteer Michael Malampy about what it was like out searching for these venerable denizens, and what they found, and what it means to Cleveland. We'll return with This Old Tree. 
Margeaux, welcome to the show. Welcome to This Old Tree.

Margeaux Apple  29:38
Thank you for having me.

Doug Still  29:40
Where do you work now? And what's your role there?

Margeaux Apple  29:43
Yeah, I currently work at Cambridge University Botanic Garden, which is the Botanic Garden of the University of Cambridge in the UK. And my role is on the curatorial team at the Botanic Garden. My title is collections coordinator. I guess I'll take a step back back and talk about what a botanic garden is because I think that's relevant to explaining what curation is. But a botanic garden is a documented collection of plants. And the key term there is documented. So that's what separates a botanic garden from a park or a display garden, is the records that you keep on your plant. So, for any given plant and a botanic garden, you know, we should be able to tell you, first and foremost, you know, what that plant is, you know, if it's a red oak, if it's a white pine, whatever it is, we should be able to tell you what that plant is. We should be able to tell you where it came from, if it came from, you know, a nursery or if it came from, you know, the specific place in the wild, where it was collected as a seed. All of that information, all that metadata is captured in your botanic gardens plant records database. And so I help to manage that database. One of my key roles is assisting in auditing. So our collection differed from other museums and that we have a living collection, right? So things die, things grow, things proliferate, things happen at a botanic garden.

Doug Still  31:13
So it's amazing coming from the Moses Cleveland Tree Project. I mean, this is… this is what you do. This is your specialty.

Margeaux Apple  31:22
Absolutely. I mean, so before being at Cambridge, I was at Holden Forests and Gardens, which is an arboretum and botanic garden in Cleveland, Ohio, and Cleveland’s where I'm from. and this is what I… I was the plant recorder for that institution. So I, you know, I loved it, like I absolutely loved like everything about plant records. I found it fascinating, I love the inventory process, it just like, it just all clicked. And so when… I think it would… I was trying to remember how I got involved in the Forest City working group…

Doug Still  31:53
So that's how you came to the Moses Cleveland trees project? Was through the Forest City Working Group?

Margeaux Apple  31:58
Correct. So at the time, the two co chairs of the Forest City working group, so in like, winter 2021, it was Cathi Lehn, who works for the city of Cleveland, who's a fabulous person. And then Courtney Blaschke, who was the community forestry director for Holden, and I think she tapped me at that time. There's nothing better than, like, a big tree, right? Like, just like, there's just such a power to it. And just finding all of these different ones … it was just…it was really fun February, yeah.

Doug Still  32:34
Now, how did they train you to do that? Or did you kind of come up with the methodology? Or is it just as simple as taking a list and dividing it up?

Margeaux Apple  32:43
They divvied it up by community or by like kind of city limits. So the Moses Cleveland trees are not just in the city of Cleveland, but in the county of Cuyahoga…

Doug Still  32:54
Right. 

Margeaux Apple  32:55
…in Cuyahoga County, right? And so, I was given three lists initially: I was given a list for the city of Cleveland, Parma and Parma heights, which are like just south kind of southwest of the city. Each list had, you know, it was an Excel spreadsheet of, you know, species names, the Quercus alba, a location, and some of them had like the DBH’s that were measured in 1946, 1976, and 1980s.

Doug Still  33:30
For those who are wondering, DBH means diameter at breast height, which is how trees are measured, four and a half feet above the ground.

Margeaux Apple  33:38
Some of them had notes. The data was very like… some of it was really good, some of it was really sparse, some of it was real detective work, like it was the case where you know, it would say, on Esterbrook playground, and you're like, “well there's no such thing as Esterbrook playground in today – like – today.” I went to like the archival maps of the city and found where Esterbrook playground was, because, you know, there were situations where you wanted to say, “Okay, I think this is the tree, but maybe something didn't match. Maybe the DBH was smaller than it was in 1984.” …There were a few where you had to do some detective work. But for the most part, it was pretty straightforward. You know, you got an address, and you drove to that address, and you knew. You knew before even approaching the address.

Doug Still  34:32
I see it. 

Margeaux Apple  33:34
Yeah, if there's this huge canopy, you're like, “Oh my god, it's here!” Or if you didn't see it, you're like, “Dang, you know, it's, it's not here.”

Doug Still  34:43
Right, right. And so what information did you collect? 

Margeaux Apple  34:46
So I collected species first and foremost, most of them were true to name.

Doug Still  34:51
How's your tree ID?

Margeaux Apple  34:53
I love tree ID. Yeah.

Doug Still  34:56
We'd get along.

Margeaux Apple  34:58
It seems like it, yeah. 

[Doug and Margeaux laugh]
Yeah, so I would collect that information. So, taxa, I would collect where, and I would give an address, but I would also… I looked up like city parcel so that information is consistent.

Doug Still  35:14
Right. 

Margeaux Apple  35:15
So that city parcel… I tried to take coordinates… I did, I took coordinates on most of them. So GPS coordinates, I took the DBH. And then I would write any, like, conditional evaluation. So I'd say, it's in good condition, it's fair, it's in poor, and then I try to kind of qualify that information. So say, you know, significant branch dieback, you know, IV up the crown, just anything that was kind of seem pertinent to give somebody kind of a picture of what was going on with this tree. I took pictures of every one too.

Doug Still  35:53
Which site that you visited was your favorite?

Margeaux Apple  35:56
Well, I think I'm biased a bit because Lakeview cemetery is just, like, just in general, it is a absolutely gorgeous, you know, place just to be; you get a view of the lake from the higher elevations, you have people like James D. Rockefeller, Garfield, the president Garfield, Jeptha Wade, like you have all these really prestigious, I guess, people buried there. And then you have 100% success rate, or retention rate, for the Moses Cleveland trees that have been there since 1946.

Doug Still  36:34
That's amazing. And it makes sense because very little changes in a historic cemetery. Things are stable, right? Over time.

Margeaux Apple  36:42
Stable, you have a crew of arborists or you know, you have hired arborists to take good care of the trees. I mean, the crazy thing is, though, Doug, like you have the, you know, the bole of the tree, and then maybe two feet from it, a grave, and you're like, they were digging down six feet, like right at the base of this tree. And yet here is this 300 year old white oak with a, you know, five foot diameter, and it seems fine. Like it doesn't seem like it skipped a beat. In the summer of 2021, we led, myself and Roy, led tree tours in Lakeview of the Moses Cleveland trees. So that was like part of the celebration.

Doug Still  37:27
Oh that’s great! What's, like, what's the most fantastic tree in the cemetery?

Margeaux Apple  37:31
One of the Moses Cleveland trees! There is this white oak there that I was introduced to first in January 2020, by the, then, like, senior horticulturalists of the cemetery. And she showed it to me because it was her favorite tree on the grounds. And I've been going to the cemetery since I was a kid, and I had never been to this part, and I’d  never seen this tree, or at least I don't remember it. And it is just like such a presence. It's got a five foot diameter of a base, it's got these beautiful branches that kind of swooped down. And so when I measured it, it was 100 feet tall, and this was in the summer of 2021, or 2020, and it was 117 feet in spread. 

Doug Still  38:20
Wow.

Margeaux Apple  38:21
It was just massive. Like it's just so beautiful.

Doug Still  38:24
They can really spread out in the open.

Margeaux Apple  38:28
Yeah, and it's just amazing to see. So that, I mean, without a doubt, that is my favorite tree, possibly, like, period, end of statement.

Doug Still  38:38
Do you have any unusual stories of visiting someone's house or an interaction with, you know, one of the owners?

Margeaux Apple  38:45
I had a few interactions. I remember one woman she asked, you know, she's like, “So who's taking care of this tree?” And I'm like, “Girl, like it's on your property. That's how this works.” 

[Doug laughs]

I'm like, I know, it's like, because you know, you have this huge tree and you have these bows that go right over their house. Like, you know, if one of those went out…  that would be just your whole house, right? And that’s not, as you probably know, it's not cheap to maintain these big trees.

Doug Still  39:16
No, no. Maybe she was looking to… maybe she thought there was some sort of historic preservation funds for these trees. Maybe there should be.

Margeaux Apple  39:24
I know, and I'm like, I wish there was something like that, because I feel like it would make people more inclined and not so, like, skeptical of these trees or whatever. But this was in February 2021 when we were going around so COVID was still very present. And so I remember one woman we were looking for a tree… I think she was in Parma or Parma heights. So we went up to her door and kind of… you go up to the door and then you back up, you know, as you do in COVID times, but um… I was like, “I think there might be one of these Moses Cleveland trees…” I explained the story you know… she's like, “Well, both my son and I have COVID right now, but if you want, like, just go around back and look and see if your tree is there.” And I thought that was really sweet of her. Like let these, you know, two trolling tree searchers just…

Doug Still  40:18
Right. We're not gonna get near you but knock yourself out. 

Margeaux Apple  40:20
Yeah, yeah, people were very curious. One fella, he was like, “I know the tree you're looking for. It's not here anymore, but I can give you… I have the plaque.” And then we went into his backyard, and you could see this new grass patch that was probably, you know, five feet in diameter. And he…and so we took a picture of holding up the plaque in front of the, kind of, blank slate. But then he said that there was a second – this is a white oak – there was another white oak that was pretty, pretty large in diameter, not far from it. And he's like, “I'm pretty sure that's, you know, an offspring of it.” Which is good to see.

Doug Still  40:57
I was also put in touch with Michael Melampy, another inventory volunteer in charge of finding Moses Cleveland trees in Berea, and its surrounding towns, which is southwest of Cleveland.

Michael Melampy  41:09
Well, I'm a retired professor of biology. I taught biology at the undergraduate level for over three years, mostly at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio. And I taught ecology, evolution, vertebrate natural history course, and then … some courses, primarily for non majors that dealt with environmental issues.

Doug Still  41:36
When did you first become aware of the Moses Cleveland trees? Were they well known before this project occurred?

Michael Melampy  41:44
No. But I knew… There was a retired professor of biology at B.W., who lived about a block away from me, who had one of the Moses Cleveland trees in his yard. And he had a plaque on it. And he sort of explained to me a little bit about how he got involved.

Doug Still  42:07
He was already… he was involved in a project?

Michael Melampy  42:11
He had applied to have his tree listed as a Moses Cleveland tree. With this, I believe this was called, Early Settlers Association.

Doug Still  42:21
I see. So he had this plaque. He knew it was one of them, and wanted to make sure it was on the list, and then it was located.

Michael Melampy  42:28
He was, yeah. He was responsible for getting his tree recognized as a Moses Cleveland tree.

Doug Still  42:35
But did you have a particular ecological interest in these trees? As a professor?

Michael Melampy  42:41
I was interested in finding out what kind of trees were still with us. Starting from the, well, the initial cohort was labeled, designated back in the 1940s, but then, subsequent trees had been added at different times in the 1970s, and 1980s. And I was just interested to see what kinds of… of those initial trees which ones were still standing? Which species seemed to have the greatest longevity, the greatest resilience, in other words? Given that the environment around them was constantly changing, and especially being increasingly urbanized in one way or another.

Doug Still  43:28
I asked him about his own interactions with residents.

Michael Melampy  43:32
And then I would have to ask permission, of course, from property owners to measure their trees and just examine the trees, if it still existed. I mean, the first step would be to contact the owner and say, “Do you have an old tree? That might be a Moses Cleveland tree?”

Doug Still  43:51
Were many people aware of what that even was?

Michael Melampy  43:54
Most of the people that had them on their property were aware, yeah. The percentage that still had plaques was probably… I'd say less than half of them still had plaques. But most of them were aware that they had an old tree that had been designated as a Moses Cleveland Tree.

Doug Still  44:14
Right, so they're probably happy to tap back into this and have their tree recognized.

Michael Melampy  44:19
I wasn't able to contact everyone. But most of the people that I was able to contact were more than happy to let me, if the tree still existed, let me look at it. And some people who had lost their trees would explain to me what happened to the tree. In a couple of cases, I was never able to find out if the tree existed or not because it wasn't able to get onto the property

Doug Still  44:47
When the trees weren't there, according to the list, did you notice a pattern? Were they new houses? was there… How would you ascribe the loss of these trees?

Michael Melampy  45:00
It varied a lot. Sometimes it looked to me like, like in the case of the tree I just described, the old tree had just died for various reasons. In other cases there were clear indications of development having gone on.

Doug Still  45:20
Jumping back to Roy, I asked him what the data told him about the Moses Cleveland trees, and about the Cleveland urban forest in general.

Roy Larick  45:29
What became quite clear is the goals of designating Moses Cleveland trees changed quite a bit. Arthur Williams wanted to have the native forest represented by these trees. It was clear that some of these minor species could not be found anymore. From 23 species, it came down to… for these 143, designated by the early settlers Association, there were seven total species represented, and four of those were oak species. 

Doug Still  46:05
Wow, that's quite a reduction.

Roy Larick  46:06
That's a reduction. Yep.

Doug Still  46:09
How many of the original 153 trees were remaining, after you completed your survey?

Roy Larick  46:15
I want to say 40.

Doug Still  46:19
Wow, approximately a quarter we're left.

Roy Larick  46:21
The latest figures are 77 trees, Moses Cleveland trees, out of the 296. There are 77 that still stand.

Doug Still  46:31
What do you think these findings tell us about how the urban forest is changing?

Roy Larick  46:37
I'm going to recast that a bit, and say, how we are changing the urban forest, how humans are changing. And what we can learn from these. And I think the most important thing that comes from the Moses Cleveland trees, whether they're standing or not, is that the oaks dominated. You know, the oaks are the long lived nice looking trees. Oaks grow, to some extent, everywhere. But there are areas that prefer one species or another, or to put it the other way around, there are places where a certain species of oaks can adapt well, and others where those same species don't. If you step back and look at the associations, the normal associations of those oaks, with other forest members… with other tree species… when you get to areas that have a good representation of Moses Cleveland oaks, you can reconstruct, beyond the oaks themselves, what tree species were there. Those patterns then become a guide for how we can reforest along more natural lines. Let's start the process by understanding what grew there prehistorically, and what of those prehistoric species still make sense to put there currently, as anchors for an urban forest?

Doug Still  48:13
Why do you think so many of the trees were lost? Let's just development it: Cleveland expands since World War II?

Roy Larick  48:23
That's right, especially since World War II. But what has done in the bulk of the Moses Cleveland trees is road widening, underground utilities and overhead utilities. That improvement – infrastructure improvement – certainly carried on through the 1990s. And only now, I think, are we starting to second guess that and to try to understand means for people moving around without the tyranny of the car. 

Doug Still  48:53
Do you think this project, though, will help raise the profile of old trees in Cleveland and the surrounding area?

Roy Larick  49:00
I believe the best way that we're going to do this is to take on for a third time, a third chapter, the designation of new heritage trees or legacy trees. And we're not sure what we're going to call these, whether it will be Moses Cleveland trees, I'm not sure, because the trees we designate, not all of them are going to be those that are 250 years old, but they will be distinctive trees. Those trees that are of species that we want to promote, those trees that are just those that people care about.

Doug Still  49:39
Sort of a broader heritage tree program. 

Roy Larick  49:42
That's right. 

Doug Still  49:43
After working on the project, I asked all three guests what they thought the Moses Cleveland trees mean to Cleveland and the surrounding area.

Michael Melampy  49:52
It's interesting. They represent to me anyway, a link back to the… back to the founding… founding, if you want to say that…back to the pre settlement conditions of this area.

Margeaux Apple  50:07
It was really fun to see kind of the community, and I guess a subset of the community, you know, celebrating these trees and congregating around…our natural heritage in Cleveland. And that was really cool. And we had…a celebration on, you know, the 225th anniversary at Forest City Brewery. And it was just like a beautiful event where we were just there to kind of celebrate our natural heritage in Cleveland.

Doug Still  50:38
That’s perfect that it was at the Forest City Brewery.

Margeaux Apple  50:41
I know, right? But yeah, so there was that, which was just like, very fun. And like the tree tours were a great opportunity to just meet people from the community who are interested in the same things as you and to discuss, you know, tree stories, because every time, you know, you talk about these trees, people bring up their big tree in their backyard or things like that. It just made me so badly wish for a time machine to see what the area looked like, you know, in the 1700s, in the 1600s, whatever. You see these huge trees that were probably just little saplings at that time, and like, it's just a world away, isn't it? And to like, really celebrate the fact that we still have these little beacons into the past.

Roy Larick  51:33
They mean, environmental stability. They mean that in the sense of desire, more than statement of fact. 

[music]

You see an old tree, a beautiful old tree, and you think it's been there forever. And it's still there. And if it's healthy, it looks like it could be there forever more. So the Moses Cleveland trees represent, once again, a kind of stability, where it's lacking.

Doug Still  52:04
Great answer. Anything else you want to add?

Roy Larick  52:07
Once again, trees represent elderflora. They are timeless. You look at them and you enter into tree time, so to speak.

Doug Still  52:18
Tree time. I love it.

Roy Larick  52:20
Tree time, right.

Doug Still  52:23
The Moses Cleveland trees were ecological bellwethers for a shrinking tree canopy. At the same time, their remaining numbers have a symbolic legacy, and point the way to a larger, healthier urban forest in the future. Clevelanders are already demonstrating the hard work and awareness to make that happen. I'd like to thank each one of my wonderful guests Roy Larick, Margeaux Apple and Michael Melampy for sharing their knowledge and experiences. I raise an inventory clipboard in your honor, and to all of the people that organized and contributed to the Moses Cleveland Tree Project. Thank you tree lovers for joining me again today. You can find us on Facebook and Instagram for photos and updates and general tree stuff. The show's theme song is written by arborist Dee Lee. I'm Doug still, and I'll see you next time on This Old Tree.

[This Old Tree theme music]