White River Junction
“This isn’t the kind of wood that I would use normally, but I might fool around with a little bit of it,” said Brad Goedkoop, the taller of the two men. From his workshop in Wilder, Goedkoop makes traditional Japanese wooden swords and staffs for martial arts practitioners around the world.
“For the products I do, mechanical properties and impact strength are the most important,” he said. “I might take a few little pieces and test it.”
“It’s fairly fibrous,” said the other man, Paul Nelson, who had a pencil tucked behind his ear and a tape measure on his belt. Nelson’s workshop is in Quechee, and he usually keeps busy making fine custom cabinetry, furniture and doors, but a barn behind the workshop is filled with evidence of his hobby — antique boats that he was in the process of restoring. He needed long, seven- or eight-foot lengths that he could steam and curve for use as boat ribs.
“I’ve never worked with elm before, except to rip it out of a rotten boat and replace it with white oak,” Nelson said. “I figure it’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”
“Yeah,” responded Goedkoop. “It’s got a very high split resistance.”
Goedkoop is also Hartford’s tree warden. Just two years ago, he was excited when he first discovered the 62-year-old elm on the upper banks of the White River, hidden in a tangle of box elders and grapevines on the corner of the Town Hall property. He told his fellow tree enthusiasts at the Hartford Tree Board that it was a magnificent specimen, seemingly untouched by Dutch elm disease, a deadly fungus that has depleted the country of much of its American elm stock.
“We were totally jazzed about it,” he said.
But the very next summer, Goedkoop saw the telltale yellowing of leaves. This year, with mixed emotions, he signed off on the removal of the dead elm by New England Tree Experts, a company contracted by Green Mountain Power to remove the elm Tuesday and thereby protect a set of power lines that ran beneath its branches while carrying electricity along Bridge Street.
One of the crew members, listening to the speculation about the wood, said it was likely to be very dry.
Goedkoop eyed the branches, completely devoid of leaves or bark and covered in the telltale winding furrows that marked the trails of fungus-carrying beetles.
“I have my suspicions about whether it’s going to be any good at all,” he said.
The removal of the Town Hall elm is just one more sign of an ongoing broadside against Vermont’s American elm trees, said John Molleur, who, along with his brother, inherited the 80-employee New England Tree Experts from his father.
Elms make up less than 1 percent of the forest canopy in Vermont and New Hampshire, according to a 2012 USDA report, but Molleur estimates that over the past several years, they’ve comprised 15 percent of the thousands of trees his company removes each year.
“A lot of the people kept nice elm trees everywhere, and now they’re all dying out. The state of Vermont has become a kind of an epidemic,” Molleur said. “It’s hit Vermont really hard in the past five years, I’d say.”
From Molleur’s perspective, elms are good trees because they can coexist with power lines much better than most other species.
“We enjoy saving a good tree,” he said. “We appreciate a good tree.”
“This is the really cool thing about an elm tree and why they were so highly valued as a street tree,” Goedkoop said, “is because they have that ability to go straight up and then shoot completely over the power lines without interfering with anything.”
That trait helped American elms become the most commonly planted tree in the country in the 20th century. But beginning in the 1930s, Dutch elm disease began decimating stocks, reducing an estimated 77 million trees planted in urban areas to just 34 million by 1976. Far fewer remain today, according to Rose Paul, director of critical lands and conservation science at the Nature Conservancy, a Montpelier-based nonprofit.
Paul said it’s difficult to track trends in the ongoing battle between the elms, and the fungus that plagues them, because the fungus is continually evolving into new strains that can sweep through a forest.
“Pathologists talk about different waves coming through with a new strain of the fungus, and some of them can be more virulent,” she said.
Paul said that elm trees aren’t totally eradicated, because they typically live for as long as 10 years, which gives them a chance to reproduce before they succumb to the disease. But the towering, mature trees with the picturesque spreading crown is becoming increasingly rare.
The Town Hall elm isn’t the only recent victim of the disease.
Just a year ago, in an interview with the Valley News, Goedkoop was pointing to another elm, a massive specimen at the White River Junction VA Medical Center on Route 5 as an example of a small population of prize trees that should be recognized as a community asset.
On Tuesday, that tree still had most of its bark, but empty patches were clearly visible between leafless twigs on the upper branches and trunk. It’s also dead, according to Goedkoop.
The disease is also keeping those who manage other high-profile elms on their toes. At Dartmouth College, a handful of mature elm trees are an integral part of the landscaping outside Parkhurst Hall and on the green.
Brian Beaty, Dartmouth’s arborist, said on Friday that workers check the trees every day from May through July for signs of the disease.
“Our crew is very good at spotting early signs,” he said. “When we see an infected branch, we remove it immediately because we know that the disease spreads very quickly through the tree.”
The larger trees, said Beaty, are treated with fungicide.
“It’s because of the College’s commitment to maintaining an arborist and a skilled tree crew that so many big elms survive here,” he said.
There is hope that elms can be restored to the American streetscape and its historic range throughout New England, Paul said. The Nature Conservancy is in year two of a three-year effort to plant 7,000 elm trees throughout Vermont.
The newly planted trees have been developed for a certain level of tolerance, said Paul, and can sometimes overcome a fungal invasion by growing a protective wall of closed-off woody cells that contains the problem.
The hope is that the tolerant trees, some of which are planted along Route 5 between Maple Street and Hartford High School, will cross pollinate with native populations, conferring tolerance to offspring.
In the meantime, as a new, virulent strain of the fungus continues to fell the remaining members of the older stock, there’s an opportunity for woodworkers like Nelson and Goedkoop.
“It’s a sad thing when a tree like this goes,” Goedkoop said, “but why not try to make something good out of it?”
When Nelson takes on a restoration project, he’s most interested in the boats originally built by the Peterborough Canoe Co., an Ontario-based company that made canoes from the 1890s to the 1960s. The canoes, now considered antiques and collectors’ items that sell for thousands of dollars, were originally made using steam-bent elm ribs covered by strips of red cedar. Elm was ideal, Nelson said, because it could be worked under steam and was resistant to rot.
“The whole assembly was held together with clenched copper nails, and waterproofing was aided by using pitch at all the seams,” said Nelson, who can trace his boat-building lineage directly back to Peterborough. He owns a canoe built by a man who was taught by Walter Walker, who was “the last living employee of the Peterborough Canoe Co.,” Nelson said.
Because mature elm has been hard to come by, Nelson has been using white oak as a substitute material. But the removal of the Town Hall elm resulted in a bounty of the 8-foot-long pieces that Nelson needed to make boat ribs. He had arranged for Chippers Inc., a Pomfret-based tree service company, to haul the dead elm’s trunk and some of its branches to a mill for processing into lumber.
He looked at the tree, and at how he might be able to give a piece of it new life.
“It could be in the Great Lakes,” he said. “If I can finish one before I croak.”
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.