London Grove Oak
The London Grove Oak stands in front of a Quaker meeting house about two miles west of Route 1, where the West State Road jogs on to Newark Road.
“I become speechless every time I see it,” says Chadds Ford arborist Robb King. “There is literally nothing like this anywhere in the world.”
Plenty of white oaks thrive in Pennsylvania, but London Grove’s is seriously huge. Last measured in 2006, the London Grove White Oak is the roughly the size of a 9-story building, with branches extending outward 135 feet from a trunk that averages about seven feet in diameter.
A plaque attached to the trunk indicates this is one of the region’s remaining Penn Oaks, an oak tree that is believed to have been alive before 1682, when William Penn first visited Pennsylvania. It is literally part of Penn’s Woods—deeded to him as payment of a debt owed Penn’s father by King Charles II.
A 1690 incorporation document of the London Grove Quaker Meeting, currently archived at Swarthmore, mentions a tree on the site long before the original meetinghouse was constructed. Whether the tree in the document is the tree that survives cannot be determined.
King guesses the tree is anywhere from 325 to 400 years old. He can’t be sure until the tree dies, a cross section is taken across the trunk, and the growth rings are counted.
“When the first surveys were done in 1932 to find what was left of the original Penn’s Woods, the ages were educated guesses based on size and examples of older trees in the region that had died,” he says. “With this tree, you don’t need to know a number to know it’s been around for a long time. If this isn’t the oldest living thing in the county, it’s one of the few.”
He puts his hand on the trunk. “To be able to do this, to be able to touch a thing that’s survived so long.” He lets his hand sit there for a while, and then takes it away.
When we think of old trees, the first that come to mind are the 3,000-year-old California sequoias. California also has Methuselah, a bristle cone pine in the Inyo National Forest that is thought to be as many as 4,800 years old. In Nevada, another bristle cone pine called Prometheus is estimated at 5,000 years old.
A few years ago a 9,550-year-old spruce in Norway—similar to the millions of pines used for Christmas trees—was awarded the title of the oldest tree on the planet after its root system was carbon dated.
Compared with such elders, the old trees of the Brandywine Valley are mere babies. But, for all their youth, they are the region’s most magnificent natural, and historic landmarks, beginning with the man whose commonwealth was unique in the American colonies.
Instead of fighting the native inhabitants of his colony, Penn, who spent barely two years in the land that bears his family name, made peace with them. His treaty “of amity and friendship” with the Lenni Lenape is portrayed in a well-known painting by Benjamin West.
The meeting between Penn and Lenape Chief Tamanend is believed to have taken place under a vast elm tree in a place called Shackamaxon on the western banks of the Delaware River. Shackamaxon was neutral ground among the region’s three Lenape tribes, and also briefly served as a base of operations for Penn in managing and surveying the colony.
The choice of the tree was deliberate: the elm was a sacred object among the Lenape tribes. It survived until 1810, when it was blown down in a storm.
Philadelphia’s Penn Treaty Park, established in 1893, is marking the anniversary of the tree’s demise with an exhibit that quotes a statement made by the US Supreme Court Justice John Marshall in 1831, when Marshall was given a box made from the sacred elm.
“The box is to me an inestimable relic,” Marshall said. “I know no inanimate object more entitled to our reverence than the tree of which it was a part, because I think few events in history have stronger claims on our serious reflection, on our humanity, our sense of rights, and on our judgment, than the treaty which was made under it, and the consequences which followed that treaty.”
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