By Michael F. Duggan
This past spring, for the first time in 303 or 304 years, the Linden Oak—Maryland’s Bicentennial Tree—did not leaf out. It is dead. I suppose that the tree, estimated to have sprouted in 1718, the year that Blackbeard was killed (14 years before George Washington was born, more than 30 years before the port of Georgetown was founded and more than 70 years before Washington, D.C., itself), finally had enough of the traffic on Rockville Pike. Either that or the Bethesda it once knew had become terminally unrecognizable to it. I know how it must have felt.
It had witnessed at least one military action during the Civil War (a running skirmish down the Pike toward Bethesda in 1864),1 and was a stone’s throw from Pooks Hill, where Crown Princess Martha of Norway (an intimate of Franklin Roosevelt) lived during the Second World War. On December 27, 1940, the hearse bearing the body of F. Scott Fitzgerald passed it on its way from the Pumphrey Funeral home in Bethesda to a cemetery in Rockville.2 It had also witnessed the incredible postwar growth of suburban Maryland. For almost 60 years it put up with the Capital Beltway a few hundred yards to the south, and for more than 4 decades it stood in the shadow and noise pollution of an elevated section of the Washington, D.C. Metro System’s Red Line.
Old trees die all the time. But for me, the death of the Linden Oak is emblematic of the loss in recent decades of so much of what was so good about Bethesda.
PostScript, July 18, 2023
The big oak came down today, at least most of it did. A section of the trunk about 15 to 20 feet tall is all that remains. The county took it down.
Two large sections from where the trunk branched out now lie on their side. I climbed up onto one. I walked-off an approximation of the diameter of the standing portion of the trunk (atop of which was a dried snakeskin). It came to about five yards wide or a bit longer than a Miata roadster. It occurred to me that you did not get a realistic impression of the mass of the tree when you drove by on Beech Drive or its nearby ramp onto Rockville Pike.
A portion of the tree will be made into a sculpture.
Notes
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-battle-of-bethesda-a-daylong-firefight-in-jubal-earlys-march-into-washington/2014/04/24/af6bf6f0-c84a-11e3-bf7a-be01a9b69cf1_story.html
- Tiffany Arnold, “Why ‘Gatsby’ Author F. Scot Fitzgerald Made Rockville His Final Resting Place,” Patch, May, 9, 2013.