Find the Witness Tree Game!

Here is your chance to develop your witness-tree identification skills! Each month we will post here a batch of 5 or so then-and-now photographs that include one or more witness trees – but here is the catch: the images will be unlabeled (except for the years the pictures were taken). It will be your challenge to find the witness trees!

You can click on any picture to enlarge it, or download a picture to your computer if you want to zoom in even further.

The answers to all 5 Witness Tree mystery images can be found here.


Batch 1.

1. EASY LEVEL: 1 tree.

Photo 1 (easy): this monstrous white oak stands in the woods just south and east of the 19th Indiana monument on Meredith Avenue.


2. EASY LEVEL: 2 trees.

Photo 2 (easy): there are two witness trees to be found in these pictures, which were taken just to the north of the Fredericksburg Artillery on West Confederate Avenue. This cannot get any easier.


3. MEDIUM LEVEL: 2 trees.

Photo #3 (medium): to the north and west of the Reynolds Death Monument stand a pair of witness trees in the Herbst Woods; one of them, unfortunately, is dead.


4. MEDIUM LEVEL: 1 tree.

Photo 4 (medium): in the woods to the north and east of Spangler’s Spring on Culp’s Hill, there stands a gigantic white oak witness tree.


5. HARD LEVEL: 1 tree.

Photo 5 (hard): it may be harder to find the witness tree pictured here, only because there are so many trees to filter out. We are looking at the hard left turn on the crest of lower Culp’s Hill here; the monument to the 29th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry stands on the left, the 2nd Maryland Infantry (CSA) on the right.