The Battle of Brandywine was fought around this sycamore on 11 September 1777, when it was already 168 years old by the reckoning of the college that later raised a seedling from its seed. It stands beside the Gideon Gilpin farmhouse, where the wounded Marquis de Lafayette had his leg dressed that day. Five and a half metres round and thirty-four metres tall, with the flaking white upper limbs American sycamores show once the leaves are down. The battlefield grounds are free to walk and the tree is a short way in.
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The Brandywine Sycamore (Lafayette Sycamore)
American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis) · roughly 400 years · Brandywine Battlefield Park, Chadds Ford Township, Delaware County
This sycamore was already 168 years old on the day the Battle of Brandywine broke around it. That figure comes from Union County College, which raised a seedling from its seed in 1997 and recorded the parent at 220 inches around, 111 feet tall and dating from about 1609. On 11 September 1777 the fighting ran through these fields, and the Marquis de Lafayette, nineteen years old and shot through the leg, was carried into the Gideon Gilpin farmhouse the tree stands beside to have the wound dressed. The tree is still there: five and a half metres round, thirty-four metres up, with the mottled white upper limbs an American sycamore shows once the outer bark flakes off. A bicentennial marker went in beside it in 1987. Worth saying plainly what a witness tree is and is not. Nothing in the wood records the battle. The claim rests on the tree's age and its position beside a house the wounded were brought into, and both of those are documented. The battlefield is a National Historic Landmark and the grounds are free to walk; the Gilpin house interior is timed guided tours only, Thursday to Sunday. The pin here marks the house rather than the trunk, because no tree-level fix exists, but the two stand within a yard of each other.
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