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Black gum trees survive in Vt. swamps
November 16, 2003
Rare growth By ANNE WALLACE ALLEN The Associated Press
VERNON — Way out of their customary range, surrounded by a forest of native hardwoods, stand Vermont’s rare black gum trees, a southern species thought to be a relic from when the climate was warmer.
The centuries-old gums — also known as buttonwood, pepperidge and tupelo — grow in swamps in Vermont’s far southeastern corner, just north of the Massachusetts border.
Foresters, botanists, and nature-lovers revere the tall old trees as a rare remnant of when Vermont was covered in forest.
“To me, it’s a very spectacular and a very surreal place,” said Windham County Forester Bill Guenther. “The coolest time to go out there is a morning when it’s foggy and misty. It has a very medieval feel to it.”
Vernon’s four black gum swamps lie in the J. Maynard Miller Memorial Town Forest, about 450 acres of woodland that the town purchased in 1973 for firewood and recreation. The area is named for a dairy farmer and longtime selectman who worked hard to conserve land in town. He died in 1998.
Maynard Miller knew the black gums were valuable because they were unusual, said Miller’s son, Paul Miller, whose sons now manage the family farm in Vernon.
“My dad spent a lot of time cruising the area,” he said. “He was very interested in conservation, so it was a tribute to him.”
The town forest also has some other species not typically found in Vermont, including American chestnut, white oak and mountain laurel.
The normal range of the black gum is in the southeastern United States, said Guenther.
The trees probably flourished about 3,000 years ago, when the climate was warmer in what is now southern Vermont. When the climate became colder, most of the gums died away. But the Vernon gums are growing in large, bowl-like depressions formed by glacial melting, and were probably sheltered enough to reproduce for generations, Guenther said.
They also survived the extensive timber-cutting of the last two centuries because there isn’t much commercial use for them, said Guenther.
“So far north up here, people probably didn’t know what to do with them; our mills were used to other species,” Guenther said.
They weren’t worth cutting for firewood.
“I think it’s a fairly low BTU-value wood. It would be like cutting basswood or butternut,” he said.
Black gum is considered useful for making buttons, but evidently there wasn’t much call for it in southern Vermont.
“I suspect the stand in Vernon survived because there happened to be no button factory nearby,” said Dick Andrews, an activist for Forest Watch.
On a recent visit to the quiet, shady swamp, Andrews leapt from one grassy, mossy hummock to another to reach a tall tree surrounded by water. There he examined deep fissures in the tree’s bark, a sign of its old age. A forestry student from Marlboro College took core samples from several of Vernon’s gums and determined the oldest to be about 440 years old, he said.
A few black gums have been found a little bit farther north of Vernon, in the town of Westminster, Guenther said. And a few more survive in New Hampshire’s Rockingham County — Guenther hesitated to say exactly where — including one that is thought to be about 680 years old.
Paul Miller said the gum swamps are a curiosity that he visits several times a year and children go there on school trips
“We have a lot of people that we take up there, just because it’s a very interesting place,” he said.
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