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.
Winter shape
January and February, when the leaves are down and the white upper limbs show
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Beside the Gideon Gilpin House, Brandywine Battlefield Park, Baltimore Pike area, Chadds Ford, PA 19317You can recognise it by the mottled white upper limbs a sycamore shows once its bark flakes off, over a trunk five and a half metres round. It stands beside the Gideon Gilpin House, with a 1987 marker at its foot.
Free to view from the grounds; the Gideon Gilpin House itself is seen only on a timed guided tour (park operating as of 2023 visitor reviews, open Thu-Sun). The tree stands outside the house on the park grounds.
No public transit found; car only. Roughly 40 km / 45-60 minutes by road from central Philadelphia, over the ~30-minute public-transport day-trip threshold, so this is its own place (Chadds Ford, PA) rather than folded into Philadelphia.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.