Three giant sequoias, and the biggest is a national shrine. General Grant, the second largest tree on Earth by volume, was declared a memorial to Americans killed in war by President Eisenhower in 1956, having already been named the Nation's Christmas Tree in 1926. A few minutes away stands the Robert E. Lee, the eleventh or tenth largest tree alive depending on the count, and, in a logged-out basin just outside the park, the widest sequoia ever measured, the Boole Tree, which somehow survived the saws that took eight thousand of its neighbours.
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General Grant Tree
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · roughly 1,650 years · Grant Grove, on the paved General Grant Tree Trail loop
This is the only living thing the United States has declared a national shrine. President Eisenhower gave the General Grant Tree that title in 1956, as a memorial to Americans who died in war, thirty years after President Coolidge had proclaimed it the Nation's Christmas Tree. Two presidents, two designations, one trunk.
The trunk is the reason. It stands 81.5 metres tall and measures 32.8 metres round at the base, and it holds about 1,320 cubic metres of wood. By trunk volume alone only the General Sherman, in neighbouring Sequoia National Park, is bigger. Count the branches as well and the park service drops it to third, behind the President Tree, so its rank depends on what you measure rather than on anyone getting it wrong.
It was named in 1867 for Ulysses S. Grant, which makes the name younger than almost every ring inside it. How much younger is the part nobody has pinned down: a recent estimate cited on Wikipedia puts the tree at roughly 1,650 years, while the park service publishes no age at all, so treat that figure as one careful guess rather than a count.
The paved loop from the Grant Grove car park is short and accessible, with benches along the way. It is the largest tree in the grove, and the grove's second largest, the Robert E. Lee, ranks among the dozen biggest sequoias known.
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Robert E. Lee Tree
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · not documented · Grant Grove, near the General Grant Tree Trail
The eleventh largest tree on earth, or the tenth, depending on whose list you read, stands a few minutes from the General Grant. Both counts rest on the same 1985 survey by Wendell Flint and Mike Law: 77.6 metres tall, about 1,135 cubic metres of wood, a trunk 26.9 metres round. The disagreement is about which other giants made the ranking, not about this one.
It was named around 1875 by Richard Field, a former Confederate lieutenant, for Robert E. Lee. That puts a Confederate general's name a short walk from a tree named for the Union commander who accepted Lee's surrender, in the same grove, a decade after the war.
In 2020 the park took the name out of its official interpretive materials. It did not rename the tree, because only Congress or the park service itself can change a formal name, so the Robert E. Lee Tree is still what the records call it, and what we call it here. Its history now includes the argument about its name.
The second largest sequoia in Grant Grove has no published age. Neither source we checked gives one, and we have found no core count or estimate anywhere else. If you know of one, tell us.
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Boole Tree
Giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) · over 2,000 years · Converse Basin, reached via the Boole Tree Trail loop off Forest Road 13S55, about 4 miles north of Grant Grove Village on Highway 180
Around 8,000 giant sequoias were cut down in Converse Basin between 1897 and 1907, in what had been the largest sequoia grove in the world. The widest of them all was left standing.
The Boole Tree measures 34.4 metres round at the base, the greatest circumference of any known sequoia. It is 81.9 metres tall and the sixth largest by volume, and it now stands on its own above the Kings River, in a basin that was logged out around it.
Why it survived is disputed. The popular story says Frank Boole, the logging supervisor it is named after, spared it himself. His daughter denied that. Another account credits negotiation by the Sierra Club, and a third says it was simply too awkward to fell. All three are in print, and none of them has won.
John Muir had already measured it in 1877, under a different name, the Hugh Miller. Twenty years later the saws arrived. Sources put the tree at over 2,000 years old, which makes the logging decade a short episode in a very long life.
The tree stands on Forest Service land in Giant Sequoia National Monument, just outside Kings Canyon National Park, so there is no entrance fee. The Boole Tree Trail is a loop of roughly three and a half to five kilometres with 150 to 175 metres of climb, and the road to the trailhead opens seasonally, from late spring to early autumn.
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