Time may be nearly up for 250-year-old elm tree at Elmwood Cemetery
The elm tree stands on a bit of a rise alongside a creek that once ran red with the blood of British soldiers.
It might have been a sapling on that early morning in 1763, when Chief Pontiac prevailed at what's now Elmwood Cemetery in Detroit. Today it's probably 100 feet tall and at least 250 years old, and Joannie Capuano loves it.
"Look at this bark," she said, patting its trunk. Look at the color, a grayish brown, and the deep furrows that you could almost call wrinkles given its age.
Look while you can.
The tree is older than the Declaration of Independence. As world wars have raged and epidemics have ravaged, as Detroit has become renowned for stoves and then cars and then blight, the American elm's base has spread and its crown has risen.
But Capuano, the executive director of the Historic Elmwood Foundation, was leading a tour last year when she saw something she didn't want to believe. She checked old photographs, gazed upward again, and no, not her favorite elm — but yes.
Two massive limbs had been attacked by Dutch elm disease. Tree surgeons cut them away and sealed where they slashed, and came down with a prognosis that amounted to a coin flip.
"They told us, 'If you're lucky, that'll take care of it,' " Capuano said. "'If not, you've got 10 years.'"
A decade for a tree that weathered the Dutch elm epidemic of the 1950s and '60s, a plague that destroyed more than 100,000 Detroit elms and tore away the graceful canopies above hundreds of city blocks.
A decade for a tree you can see from anywhere on Elmwood's 86 acres, if you know to look.
No sign of the battle
The arborists from Michigan State University who deduced the elm's age in 2016 said it was one of the six oldest of its type in Michigan. A burr oak a few minutes' walk from the elm is even older, some 280 years, and it's still healthy, knock on wood.
Capuano, 63, is protective of those two above all the other 1,800 trees on the property. She's staying optimistic as best she can.
Reality tends to intrude anyway. "It breaks my heart," she said.
The Historic Elmwood Foundation supports community events, restoration, preservation and education. Its director and only paid staffer works part time and typically starts at 6:30 a.m. so she can free up desk space in the tidy but overburdened office at the main entrance.
As Capuano walked the grounds a few mornings ago, she picked up remnants of Mylar balloons — they're forbidden, but who's going to tell a grieving family no? — and found bits of history everywhere she looked.
What's now the domain of the elm tree, she said, was an encampment of cooperating tribes along Parent's Creek when the British tried to break Chief Pontiac's siege of the city.
Twenty British soldiers died, 41 were injured, and what became known as the Battle of Bloody Run gave the creek a vivid new name before most of it disappeared beneath the ground as part of Detroit's sewer system.
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A pond is all that's left to see. There's a fountain at one end, and not far from the other, a 40-foot-tall obelisk marks the final resting place of U.S. senator, Detroit mayor and Secretary of the Interior Zachariah Chandler, one of four abolitionist co-founders of the Republican Party to be buried in Elmwood.
In the shadows
Chandler died in 1879. His monument was built in seven pieces and transported on carriages.
Mike Shukwit, Elmwood's director of operations, used it to compute the elm tree's height. Double the obelisk, still plenty of tree left ... "I would say at least 100 feet," he said.
The closest spire to the tree stands at the grave of De Garmo Jones Sr., another mayor of Detroit. He died in 1846. His son, Col. De Garmo Jones Jr., died Aug. 12, 1864 — a late casualty of the Civil War, perhaps?
The shadow of the elm also falls across James Tuck, a 44-year-old attorney whose circumstances are more certain. On Aug. 16, 1987, he left Detroit to visit his daughter at college in Arizona. He died when Flight 255 crashed on takeoff at Metro Airport.
A stone bench sits above his grave, with a farewell etched in the front of the seat: "It's the laughter we will remember."
A squirrel raced down the trunk of the tree this week, leaped onto the bench, leaped off, and raced back up.
Birds chirped, too high up and too deep in the branches to be seen. Black ants in three sizes conducted business, marching in and out of the deep furrows in the bark.
At its widest, the base of the tree measured 9 feet. It looked somewhere between sturdy and immortal.
Above the scars from last year's surgery, though, about where the squirrel stopped to consider its options, two limbs tracked upward and to the right. One bent like a knee, the other more like an elbow.
The branches on the limbs had leaves, but compared to the rest of the tree, they were less than robust.
As the tree-trimmers said, the next decade will tell. But after 250 years, time might not be on the big elm's side.
Reach Neal Rubin at NARubin@freepress.com, or track him on Twitter: @nealrubin_fp.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: At Elmwood Cemetery, is time running out for a 250-year-old tree?
