Alexandria Bicentennial Sweet Gum

In the 1970s, as the United States prepared for its two-hundredth birthday, the City of Alexandria went looking for trees old enough to have stood through the Revolution. It found seventeen, gave each a plaque, and called them Living Witnesses of the American Revolution. By the city's own count, only two of the originals still stand on public land. This sweet gum, below the flagpole in Alexandria National Cemetery, is one of them. The other is a willow oak on the Holmes Run Trail. The witnesses have been dropping out for decades. A local newspaper counted six of the seventeen still standing in 2004. Today the city names just two on public land. What the paperwork does not give is a number. No source we have seen publishes this sweet gum's girth or height, and the city's page puts no age on it. The Revolutionary title says the people who chose it believed it was alive in the 1770s, but that belief comes without a measurement behind it, so treat it as the designation it is rather than a dated fact. If you have measured the tree or know its history, tell us. The cemetery is open daily from sunrise to sunset, and King St-Old Town Metro is about ten minutes away on foot. Visit quietly. It is a national cemetery, and the tree stands among the graves.