Grand Dame of Reno County

There's a Reno County landmark that's rooted in history - literally.

 

Those of us in 21st Century Kansas may not know much about it. There's no plaque to read, detailing the history she's quietly observed as life passes her by. Even Google doesn't share many of her secrets. And it certainly doesn't reveal her exact age. A grand dame never tells, you know. 

 

We were just glad to see her alive and still standing on a recent excursion down a rutted dirt road. On one of our many trips back from Miller Seed Farm last week, Randy requested a stop at the big cottonwood. We hadn't driven up the dirt road to see how it had fared after the howling winds had toppled our cottonwood and another storm had given a haircut to a hackberry tree in our driveway.

 

The tree - thought to be the largest Plains cottonwood in Kansas - is on a road just east of a cottonwood tunnel on 4th Avenue near Huntsville, our usual route to Hutchinson (and Miller Seed Farm). After the summer windstorms, more tree limbs had littered 4th Avenue, and county road crews had pushed debris from the tunnel of trees into a neighboring field, so we speculated that the mammoth cottonwood might have gotten an unwanted trim, too.

 

But the gentle giant didn't seem much worse for the wear, though there were a few branches broken off its huge "wingspan."

 

It's so big you can't get the whole thing in a single snapshot. Randy tried to demonstrate the massive trunk with his outstretched hands.

"It's a darn big tree," Jim Smith, former director at Dillon Nature Center in Hutchinson, said in an article several years ago in The Hutchinson News. I'm glad he did the measuring because we didn't come prepared, even to measure the trunk and certainly not to scale its height. It measures more than 28 feet around, 96 feet tall and has a spread of about 110 feet.  

 

 

Early Kansas settlers found the native cottonwood trees as they arrived from the eastern U.S. The wide Kansas prairie was often foreign and intimidating to settlers moving west from the Ohio Valley, the Appalachian Mountains or New England. The landscapes they had left back home were covered with trees that provided wood for building homes, fuel for cooking, fuel to warm the hearth during a harsh winter and shade to protect them from a hot summer sun. Following the Oregon and Santa Fe trails west, trees were in very short supply.

When a cottonwood tree was spotted, thoughts of shade, water, wood and back home filled the minds of weary travelers. The cottonwood gave those traveling through the state a respite from the summer sun and the courage to continue west.

When the Kansas Legislature chose the cottonwood (Populus deltoides) as the state tree in 1937, the proclamation read:

"Whereas, if the full truth were known, it might honestly be said that the successful growth of the cottonwood grove on the homestead was often the determining factor in the decision of the homesteader to 'stick it out until he could prove up on his claim'; and Whereas, The cottonwood tree can rightfully be called 'the pioneer tree of Kansas.' "

4th Street cottonwoods in winter

 

They are like the old family patriarch - tall, stately, but maybe a little rough around the edges after years of standing through the changing seasons. Many a country road is lined with these big old trees, whose shimmery green leaves seem to wave a friendly greeting in the Kansas breeze. 

 

We miss our old cottonwood, but we're glad to see the matriarch of Reno County still standing. If only she could tell the tales of what she's seen and survived!