Hard Telling Not Knowing each week tries to answer your burning questions about why things are the way they are in Maine — specifically about Maine culture and history, both long ago and recent, large and small, important and silly. Send your questions to [email protected].
There’s a reason why most towns have an Elm Street — because towering, elegant elm trees were the pride of cities nationwide, treasured as far back as Colonial times. Houses and other buildings were built around native elms, which were nurtured as assets to the community. New ones were planted along streets like natural monuments. Elm trees were ubiquitous and beloved.
By the 1980s, 75 percent of the country’s elm trees were gone. If you were born after 1970, you probably don’t remember a time when elms were in nearly every park and churchyard and along every thoroughfare.
A bark beetle that arrived on a ship in New York in 1928 spread a fungus that infected elm trees, causing them to die off from inside and slowly rot away. Though the fungus is commonly known as Dutch elm disease, it is believed to have originated in Asia, and is so-called because the scientists that discovered it were Dutch.
You can see vestiges of the prominence of elm trees all over Maine — from street corners that seem strangely empty to nicknames that live on. Waterville is still known as Elm City, despite the fact that nearly every one of its famed elms succumbed to the disease. Just one of its big elms remains today, nicknamed Ellie, which stands in Castonguay Square, and which local residents have lovingly cared for over the decades to ensure it too doesn’t fall victim to the disease.
In Bangor, elm trees lined Broadway from State Street up to Broadway Park and down Main Street from Union to Buck streets, and stood in the yards of important buildings like the county courthouse and large churches. In Portland — still nicknamed Forest City — elms were focal points of major roads, providing shade and beauty to pedestrians.
Nearly every time a particularly prominent elm tree was cut down in the 1960s or ’70s due to Dutch elm disease, a photo was snapped for local newspapers, grieving the loss of such iconic trees. That’s how big of a deal it was.
Even those trees that made it into the 21st century still weren’t immune to the plague. Herbie, a 217-year-old, 110-foot elm in Yarmouth, finally succumbed to Dutch elm disease in 2010. And in 2022, the Campana elm, the massive tree located in front of Hitchner Hall on the University of Maine campus in Orono, was taken down due to rot in its trunk.
That said, one of the places where elm trees have survived somewhat better than other parts of the country is here in Maine. In addition to the famous elm tree in Waterville, the Emerson elm, located at Pleasant Hill Preserve in Scarborough, is likely the state’s oldest and largest remaining elm, at around 200 years old and more than 50 feet tall.
The towns of Castine and Blue Hill both boast a number of large elm trees, and Castine in particular has become nationally renowned for its more than 300 historic elms, which miraculously survived Dutch elm disease. Castine’s town motto is “Under the Elms and By the Sea,” an apt description for a town founded more than 400 years ago.
Other towns have also attempted to bring back elm trees. In 2023 Houlton accepted the donation of 10 Princeton elm trees — a more disease-resistant cultivar — from a local resident, to be planted at the Aroostook County Superior Courthouse. Herbie, the famed Yarmouth tree, lives on in seedlings cloned from its DNA, as does the Campana elm at UMaine.
The decimation of elm trees helped spur the creation of programs like the Arbor Day Foundation’s Tree City designation. There are 18 towns and cities in Maine recognized as Tree Cities today, including Maine’s three largest, Portland, Lewiston and Bangor. It also helped raise caution as the emerald ash borer, an invasive insect that infects and eventually kills ash trees — also a beloved native tree, used for millennia by Wabanaki and other Indigenous people to make baskets — arrived in North America in the early 2000s.
Maine and the rest of the country are unlikely to see elm trees regain their status as iconic symbols of urban pastoralism anytime soon. Dutch elm disease still can wreak havoc even with new plantings of cultivars bred to resist it, and despite their reputation as a fast-growing tree, it will still take many decades for newer elms to reach the towering heights of their late, lamented 19th century cousins.
