The oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America grows beside a hospital car park in Danvers, about 25 kilometres north of Boston. It is a pear, planted sometime between 1632 and about 1640 by John Endecott, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and it is the only survivor of his orchard. It has had a hard four centuries. It came through a storm in 1770. In 1952 a CBS-Hytron plant and its parking lot went up around it until it was nearly hidden. In 1964 vandals took a hacksaw to its branches and trunk and cut it down to about six feet. It grew back. A chain-link fence with barbed wire went up afterwards, and a fence is still what you see it through. The tree once stood about 80 feet tall, by an account from 1875. It is far smaller now. It still fruits. A December 2024 article reports that it bears pears, a Bon Chrétien sugar pear, and a photograph dated May 2025 shows it standing. If you have seen it since, tell us how it looks. You cannot walk up to it. The North Shore Medical Center owns it and looks after it with the town, a 2011 marker overlooks it from beside the lot, and a display in the hospital lobby tells its story. From central Boston this is a car trip, or well over an hour by train and bus.
North Shore Medical Center, 100 Endicott Street, Danvers, MassachusettsYou can recognise it as the fenced pear beside the North Shore Medical Center parking lot, the old tree behind the fence. The 2011 historic marker stands at the viewing point above the lot.
Free. Stands behind a fence beside a hospital parking lot; viewed from the 2011 historic marker at the viewing level over the lot and from the medical centre's public lobby display. Not enterable.
Danvers, roughly 35 to 45 minutes by car from central Boston; by public transport commuter rail to Salem or Beverly plus a local bus or taxi, 75 minutes or more (not route-checked).
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