The Frederick Douglass Elm

Baltimore tradition holds that Frederick Douglass planted this elm as a boy, while he was still enslaved in the city. No document proves it. The people who pass the story on say some believe it, which is the honest form of the claim and the form we are keeping. What is on the record is thinner and more solid: TreeBaltimore, the city's own forestry programme, lists this English elm among Baltimore's notable trees, standing where West Hill Street meets Sharp Street in Otterbein, a short walk from Camden Yards. By the same local memory, Douglass came back to it. An account repeated around the city, which we have not managed to read at its original source, says he addressed a Baltimore crowd beneath these limbs in 1878, forty years after he escaped slavery from this city and went north. Treat the return as story rather than record until somebody produces the page. The species is its own piece of history. English elms went into American cities by the thousand in the nineteenth century, and Dutch elm disease took most of them from the 1930s onward, which is why a mature one on a street corner now stops people who know what they are looking at. Neighbours have reported bigger branches coming down in recent years. Nobody has dated it and nobody has put a tape around it. If you know either number, tell us.