The Pinchot Sycamore

This sycamore is considerably wider than it is tall: about thirty metres up, and an average spread of forty three metres across. Connecticut has nothing bigger, and the national register lists it as the champion of its species. It was measured again in November 2025 at 884 centimetres round, a trunk that takes five or six people holding hands to enclose. It is doing this on the flood plain of the Farmington River, which is exactly the wet ground an American sycamore wants. Its age is given as over two hundred years and possibly beyond three hundred. There is no planting date, and nobody has cored it. It carries the name of Gifford Pinchot, the conservationist who later governed Connecticut, which makes it one of the few champion trees named for someone who would have known what the title meant. The town built a park around it rather than the other way round: open lawn, a boat launch onto the river, and floodlights since 1997, so the frame is legible after dark as well. The October snowstorm of 2011 took some of the canopy and left the heavy lower limbs alone, which is why the shape survived intact. Free, open, on Route 185 south of the village centre.