Mother of the Forest

The Mother of the Forest (667 BCE – 1854 CE) was an ancient and huge Sequoiadendron tree. The tree lived in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in eastern central California, United States. The dead tree's remains are within the Calaveras Grove of Big Trees State Park, in Calaveras County, California.

When the 92 giant sequoias in the valley were discovered and documented in 1852 by Augustus T. Dowd, the Mother of the Forest was the second largest tree after the Discovery Tree, which in 1853 got the name The Big Stump. The Mother of the Forest was said to stretch 328 feet (100 m) into the air, with a girth of 93 feet (28 m).

At the time of the California Gold Rush, people were searching California for undiscovered riches. As photography wasn’t developed enough yet to satisfy people’s curiosity, trees were felled and transported to big cities to prove their existence at great costs. In 1854 after unsuccessful exhibitions of the Discovery Tree, William Lapham, George L. Trask and George Gale set about to have the bark from the trunk of the Mother of the Forest removed, ready to be reassembled at exhibitions. Workers made holes in the tree using pump-augers, and inserted rods into the holes to support the weight of the scaffolding and the workers while the bark was sawed off. Over 90 days, 60 tons of bark was removed in 8 feet (2.4 m) high and 2 to 5 feet (0.61 to 1.52 m) wide sections up to the height of 116 feet (35 m). The bark was 18 inches (46 cm) thick at the base, and on average 11 inches (28 cm). Gale sent samples of the tree to foresters in the east where it was discovered to be 2,520 years old.

The removed sections of the bark were shipped by sea around Cape Horn to New York, where they were reassembled in 1855 in the shape of the tree for a "vegetable wonders of the gold regions" exhibition in the New York Crystal Palace. After New York, the bark was shipped in 1856 to London, where the sections accommodated by the building in Hyde Park attracted so much attention that all the sections were placed in their full length permanently in the The Crystal Palace in London's Sydenham the next year. It was presented to the public as the trunk of a 3,000 year old tree, and was a financial success. It stayed there until the nave of the palace, along with the bark and other exhibits, were destroyed in a fire in 1866.

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