by Andrew Vietze
Globe Pequot, 2018
I have an old farm field that seems to want to be a white pine nursery. If I didn’t brushhog it once a year, the trees would take over in no time. As it is, the seedlings are so dense in places that after each pass of the tractor, the ground looks like a freshly mowed carpet of pine. But if I’m ever tempted to think of white pine as a weed, I only need to marvel at the still-sturdy boards of my 220-year-old barn to remind me of the species’ true worth.
More reminders are found throughout Andrew Vietze’s ode to White Pine: American History and the Tree That Made a Nation. In Vietze’s telling, eastern white pine is the Forrest Gump of tree species – present at and involved in all sorts of important historical happenings, beginning long before Europeans arrived to marvel at what looked to them like an endless supply of ship masts growing tall above the other trees they saw. Native American tradition holds that when the Five Nations found themselves at war and looking for peace, they gathered beneath a towering white pine, its branches providing shelter and its clusters of five needles a symbol of unity.
He recounts other ways in which white pine plays into Native American symbols and mythology, as well as the more practical role in played in their cultures. The Algonquin, for example, made tea from the needles and peeled and ate the inner layer of bark during hard winters to prevent scurvy, a practice mocked by the Mohawks with the slur “rondak.” This term for “bark-eater” was later adopted by English settlers to refer to the mountainous region of what is today northern New York.
Vietze recounts the well-known history of “the crown” laying claim to lands in the New World based in no small part on the huge treasure of ship-building material growing there. But in the retelling he provides details that add interest to the story: how mainmasts at the time needed to be three feet in diameter at the base, and a yard tall for every inch of that width; how the English, in particular, had exhausted all of their native trees this size and were relying on mast trees imported from Russia and Norway and Bosnia; how desperate they were for materials to build their own great navy to help the country keep pace with the French and Spanish and Dutch.
As settlers arrived and began harvesting and milling these towering white pines, resentment at England grew. Lumberjacks illegally cut specimen trees that “belonged” to the monarchy. Some, like Ebenezer Mudgett, refused to pay the fines when caught. This led, 20 months before the Boston Tea Party, to a less well-known rebellion in New Hampshire, The Pine Tree Riot (a wildly entertaining story).
While much of the book is devoted to pre-Revolutionary times, White Pine covers a lot of ground, including the development of a true milling industry in the 1800s, the huge challenges posed by white pine blister rust beginning in the early 1900s, and a look at white pine’s role in today’s forest products industry. While perhaps not as interesting to history buffs, the chapters covering more recent times serve to reinforce that the value of eastern white pine remains.
At times, the tales temporarily drift too far away from the central theme. But then he returns to eastern white pine. And Vietze’s lyrical writing, scattered throughout the history lessons, keeps this from feeling like a textbook. “In the Northeast, it’s the tallest tree by a significant margin, a true giant of the land, marrying earth and sky,” he writes in one aside. “Graceful and beautiful, with arms splayed out wide in welcome, Pinus strobus smells clean and good. And the wind makes it sing in whispers – with a good breeze, pine boughs sound almost like a distant sea.”