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[57] opposite the house, and the sight of a sycamore tree to-day carries me back to my earliest memories. ‘I remember an elm that was a landmark. It must have stood somewhere near Summit avenue and Vinal avenue. There was a stone wall running from Highland avenue to Bow street, and we used to go across the fields aiming for that tree by the wall, and from there across the old Revolutionary earthworks to the church on Cross street.’ There was a group of willows near the brook which crossed School street, between Summer and Berkeley streets. A pond at the corner of School street, where the drug store now is, was the delight of some ducks. A spring on the opposite corner, covered by a roof, furnished water which was carried to Cambridge through an aqueduct made of hollowed logs. A row of ten elms of various sizes stands on Somerville avenue, between the Tube Works grounds and Park street. One of them, which appears much older than the rest, in front of the house formerly the headquarters of General Green, is one of two standing here which were of Revolutionary fame. Some of the others in the row, which in old times extended to the Middlesex Bleachery grounds, and numbered eighteen at the time of the widening of Somerville avenue in 1873-4, were set out by Samuel Tufts Frost about 1830. He carried them on his shoulder from the place where they grew. A former resident of Laurel street remembers a large elm tree which loomed up from the vicinity of Dane's ledge, not probably very old, but noticeable, springing up from such unlikely surroundings. The elm on Somerville avenue, near the foot of Central street, is one of the oldest in Somerville, and possibly the largest when in its prime. Twenty-five or thirty years ago some of the smaller branches from the centre of the tree nearly touched the ground. The widening of Somerville avenue brought the boundary line through the centre of the tree, and the change of grade left the large roots on the street side much above ground. These bulwarks were cut away, to the great injury of the tree, and this mutilation has caused it to age fast,
Somerville. Historical Society. , 1907.
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