Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1915-08-30
GIANT SEQUO|A TREES
. ARE $1,000 YEARS OLD
More Than a Million Monster
Sequoias Grow Together in
One National Park

The sequoia National Park is twen-
ty-four years old, vet, east of the
Rockies. it is scarcely known. Yel-
lowstone and Yosemite are the only
two names which the enormous ma
jority of easterners think of when Ma
tional Parks are mentioned. Neverthe-
less, Sequoia is, perhaps, in point of
average beauty, the superior of all.
II was dear to the heart of John
/ Muir, Father of National sParks and
Chief Geographer r. B. Marshall, who
knows them all as no other man
traversed them in person has declared
in print that it possesses beauty as
great as all others combined.
It is par excellence the camping
out park, as some day will be dis
covered.
| its lack of celebrity is that this is the
| Big Tree Park, and the general public
associates the Big Trees of California
with Yosemite. The Mariposa Grove,
within easy reach of the Yosemite
Valley, contains several enormous
sequoia trees. In fact the Yosemite
| National Park contains three groves OF
| these giants, the two others being the
Merced and Tuolumne Groves, which
| lie within easy reach to the north
| west.
The Sequoia National Park, however
which lies many miles south of Yose-
| mite, was created to preserve, for the
use and pleasure of the people of the
United States, by far the greatest
groves of the oldest, the biggest, and
| the most remarkable trees living in
, this world. They number 100000
! diameter. The General Sherman tree,
most celebrated of all, is 279.9 feet
! high with a diameter of 36.5 feet. The
/ Ara bham Lincoln tree is 270 feet
| high with a diameter of 81 feet The
J william Mckinley tree is 291 feet
! high with a diameter of 2S feet.
OF Mighty Dimensions
The General Grant National Park Is
usually mentioned with Sequoia be-
cause though separated by six miles
of mountain and forest, the two are
| practically the same national park.
1t contains only 2,52S acre sand was
created only for the protection of the
| General Grant tree, monster sequoia
264 feet high and thirty-f1ve feet in
! diameter. But General Grant shares
his domain with distinguished neigh
bors, notably the George Washington
tree, which is only nine feet less in
! height and six feet less in diameter
The sequoias are the oldest living
things in this world. They are the
| connecting link" writes Ellsworth
Huntington. between the ancient East
and the modern West
Three thousand fence posts suffi-
cient to support a wire fence around
| 5000 or 5000 acres, have been made
! from one of these giants, and that
| was only the first step toward using
| its huge carcass. Six hundred and
| fifty thousand shingles, enough to
cover the roofs of seventy or eighty
houses, formed the second item of its
product. Finally there still remained
! hundreds of cords of hrewood which
no one could use because of the pro-
hibitive expense of hauling the wood
out of the mountains. The upper third
of the trunk and all the branches lie
on the ground where they fell, not Wis
| ibly rotting. for the wood is wonder
fully enduring, but simply waiting till
some foolish camper shall light a de-
vastating fire.
Huge as the sequoias are. their
| size is scarcely so wonderful as their
age. A tree that has lived 500 years
! is still in its early youth; one that has
rounded out 1000 summers and win
| ters is only in full maturity; and old
| age, the three score years and ten of
the sequoias does not come for seven
teen or eighteen centuries.