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[55] the neighborhood of a hundred years old. It stood on the Shedd estate when a portion of it was purchased by Andrew Kidder eighty years ago. A very large elm stands in the yard of the old Prospect Hill schoolhouse, near the foot of Bonner avenue, which is eighty or a hundred years old. In a picture on the cover of the Somerville Journal Souvenir, published in 1901, is represented a tree of advanced age standing at the corner of Sanborn's grocery store in Union square, with a pump and drinking trough in front of it. Two button-wood trees once grew in front of the house in Union square which was moved to make way for Pythian block. This spot was once part of the homestead of the Stone family. A few rods in from the square stood a very old pear tree and a few apple trees, doubtless part of an orchard. Until a few years ago, back on the hill, on Columbus avenue, was a button-pear tree, said to have been over a hundred years old when it was cut down. Could it have been one of those pear trees mentioned by Miss Vinal in ‘The Flora of Somerville,’ which were believed to have grown from seeds scattered by the soldiers encamped on Prospect Hill during the Revolution? A pear tree is left among the shrubbery set out around the base of Prospect Hill park. This may be a descendant of those pear trees, which, together with locusts and red cedars, were common here a few years ago. A group of willows and a fine button-wood tree once grew near the foot of Walnut street. A row of pear trees, with an apple orchard behind, extended from Walnut street to the Hawkins house on Bow street, where the Methodist church now is. A row of tall trees bordered each side of the walk to the house, one of them a thorn, a tree considered a rarity then. Two immense willows remained in recent years. Two large elms overshadowed the old Hawkins house on Washington street, near the railroad bridge. The cemetery on Somerville avenue, the land for which was given by Samuel Tufts in 1804, has many interests. In it are two large willows, their trunks in an advanced stage of decay, and half their tops cut off, from the effects of an ice-storm five
Somerville. Historical Society. , 1907.
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