The Brandywine Sycamore (Lafayette Sycamore)

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.