Robert E. Lee Tree

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.