Maine’s Oldest Tree Has A Fascinating Story To Tell

Maine's oldest tree is said to be over 300 years old, which means it's older than the state.

Find the Oldest Tree in Maine Must Be Like Finding a Needle in a Haystack

It's hard to imagine that ecologists could even figure out which tree is oldest because there are so many in Maine. All my life, when asking people from away how their drive up I-95 from Boston was, I always got the same answer. "I've never seen so many trees in my life."

READ MORE: These 5 Maine Statues Have Fascinating Backstories

Of course, this is what the experts do. They seek out the oldest and the tallest and whatever other category they can come up with. And they determined the oldest tree in Maine is likely a red spruce located in the Big Reed Forest Reserve in Northern Maine, east of Eagle Lake.

Expert Say the Oldest Tree is Over 350 Years Old and Stands Tall in Northern Maine

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The tree was measured to be 352 years old by researchers working in the area. That makes it nearly 150 years older than the state of Maine.

The property the tree sits on was once owned by a wealthy shipping merchant named David Pingree, who bought up large quantities of forested land in 1820 and harvested timber from them.

The Natural Resources Council says Pingree and his family had valuable red spruce on the property but didn't have a stream large enough to float it out of the area so they decided to protect the forest.

The Ancient Spruce is Now Protected by the Natural Resources Council of Maine

In the 1980s, the family contacted the Natural Resources Council of Maine, which bought nearly 5,000 acres of their land, including the Big Reed Reserve where the old spruce sits.

How many squirrels and birds do you suppose have lived in that tree in 352 years? If only the tree could talk, what amazing stories it could tell.