Lost Landscapes

This fall, winter, and spring, the Connecticut Historical Society is celebrating trees through family programs, lectures, and exhibits, including Lost Landscapes: Great Trees from Connecticut’s Past, an exhibition of photographs by Frederick S. Brown. Each photograph captures a majestic tree from the Hartford area, photographed by Brown between 1886 and 1890. Some of the trees have historical significance. A massive elm tree, for example, stood on Broad Street in Wethersfield and was once the largest elm in America. It was planted around 1758, lived almost 200 years, and died from Dutch elm disease in 1953. But most of the trees demand attention simply for their massive height, breadth, and beauty, often in contrast with their surrounding environment of dusty city streets and buildings.

Frederick S. Brown was born in East Hartford in 1822 and lived most of his life in Hartford. He ran a cigar store on Central Row, served as a tax collector, street commissioner, and park commissioner and was a knowledgeable botanist and landscape gardener. His handwritten notes on the back of each photograph reveal a love of trees. Describing a Hartford sycamore on the bank of the Connecticut River, he writes, “I have known the tree for over sixty years. In passing it one day, a wood chopper has just cut off the large branch . . . He said that he was cutting the tree down by permission of the Valley Rail Road Co. I immediately called on them and represented the extreme age of the three, and they sent out and countermanded the permission they had given.”

Only one of the trees photographed by Brown is still standing today, a pecan hickory tree on the grounds of the Institute of Living in Hartford. At least 150 years old and the largest pecan tree in Connecticut, the tree was measured in 2002 at 92 feet high with a circumference of 184 inches.