General Gibbon's Walnut Tree

There is concrete inside this walnut, poured into its trunk more than a century ago, and you can still see it through a crevice at the base. In 1916 and 1917 the park filled the cavities of 33 witness trees this way. This black walnut is the only one of them still alive. It stands on Cemetery Ridge at the centre of the Union line, the stretch Confederate troops briefly broke through during Pickett's Charge on 3 July 1863. Local tradition says Brigadier General John Gibbon was wounded near this tree during the assault. Several sources repeat that, none documents it, so treat the wounding as a story about the tree rather than a fact about it. What is documented is the tree itself, standing on the ridge through the battle. The survey behind gettysburgwitnesstrees.com gives it more than 200 years and a trunk 284 centimetres round in 2023, up from roughly 66 centimetres across in 1906. A storm in 2021 took the top of its main trunk. It survived that too, and by the same 2023 account it still sets fruit every summer, which is a better answer than a 2008 newspaper piece that worried it was failing. It is free to visit, just off Hancock Avenue beside the position of Weir's Battery, and a few minutes' walk from the Copse of Trees.