Historical Name: Valley Forge
Common Name: River Birch
Latin Name: Betula nigra
The Valley Forge River Birch is a descendant of a tree that grew at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania during the winter of 1777-1778. George Washington and his Continental Army camped here near the Schuylkill River to wait out the inclement winter weather before they resumed battling the British in 1778. Upon arriving in December 1777 to find little to support them, Washington wrote “To see men without clothes to cover their nakedness, without blankets to lie upon, without shoes . . . without a house or a hut to cover them until those could be built and submitting without murmur, is proof of the patience and obedience which in my opinion can scarcely be paralleled.”
The 12,000 weary troops managed to build log huts and find sufficient firewood to sustain them until leaving in June 1778, and probably harvested this tree’s ancestor for that use. The Valley Forge River Birch growing in UCNJ’s Historic Tree Grove is a seedling offspring of a River Birch that grows at Valley Forge. It was planted into the Grove in 1997.
See Historic Tree #106 to learn about a tree that witnessed these events and survives to this day, the Valley Forge Sycamore.
(text adapted from American Forests)