Collegiate Times

A worker helps cut the top of the tree off during the morning's work.

The ancient sycamore that stood for over one hundred years as a landmark on the corner of College Avenue and Main Street was felled on Tuesday.

With College Avenue closed to traffic, work began around 8 a.m. and continued until 6 p.m., according to Quintin McClellan, owner of Total Tree Health Care, the company contracted to do the job.

Throughout the day, people watched the destruction from across the street and from Henderson Lawn — even in the light rain that blew in that afternoon.

“We used a crane because there’s really no place to drop the tree. Typically we’ll use rigging to take the tree down from the top down if there’s structures nearby,” McClellan said. “To handle the job, we needed heavy equipment and our goal was to get it done in one day.”

He said that the final piece of the trunk to be taken out weighed almost 8,100 pounds.

“This to me is a funeral,” said onlooker Jack Goslee. “Since the 1970s when I went to school here, it’s been a landmark. The tree is a fantabulous meeting place.”

In an open letter to the Virginia Tech community, director of facilities operations Mark Helms said his office was taking suggestions for ways to both redesign the area around Henderson Lawn and to use the wood once the tree has been removed.

“I’ve had people suggest everything from paperweights to pens. Any way to get it into the hands of alumni all over the world,” McClellan said. “Because everyone who went here remembers that tree. The money could be used to help the university or for scholarships, maybe.”

Tech will hold on to the wood until a decision is made as to how to use it. However, McClellan said many individuals have already requested pieces of the memorable tree.

Goslee, a woodcarver and whittler in his spare time, said he would like to obtain a piece of the wood to perhaps make a totem pole to memorialize the tree.

Though its exact age is uncertain, a medium-sized sapling that is visible in pictures dating back as far as 1872 — the year Tech first opened — is believed to be the tree.

A sentinel at the border of Blacksburg and Tech’s campus, the sycamore had witnessed so many of the town’s changes, yet its environment perhaps hastened its inevitable death.

“I hate cutting trees down, but it’s a part of life. When the city encroaches, the tree loses,” Goslee said.

Helms said in June that the grounds team at Tech has been looking at the tree’s declining health for more than two years and has made many efforts to sustain it.

Jay Stipes, a professor of plant pathology at Tech who calls himself “The Tree Doctor,” gave his diagnosis for the tree’s decline in health as he watched the felling Tuesday morning.

“We’re not sure exactly what brought it down, but it’s probably a complex of factors, one would be its age,” Stipes said. “It’s had a fungal disease and it’s had some root disruption. They put in conduits, and when they do that they have to sever roots. Also, if you’ll look around you’ll see that it’s surrounded by sidewalks and roads, which don’t give the roots a chance for uptake of minerals.”

According to Eric Wiseman, a forestry professor and chair of the Arboretum Committee at Tech, the fungal disease Stipes referred to is called sycamore anthracnose. Wiseman said the disease hurts the tree by causing it to lose its leaves, rendering it unable to produce enough energy to sustain itself.
It is not known yet whether the tree was planted or whether it was growing naturally, but Stipes said there is a good chance that the tree is native.

According to Helms, the tree could come down in a bad storm, and it was necessary to remove it before downtown festivities such as the Steppin’ Out street festival begin, when hundreds of people crowd the streets near the tree.

“If it were to come down it would cause some major damage, likely hitting the buildings on the opposite side of College Avenue,” Helms said. “The worst possible scenario would be to have the streets full with people and vendors.”

A version of this article appeared in the Jul 29 issue of the Collegiate Times.