04 Hazlett-Weed Tupelo

How to Find Witness Tree 04

Start by standing at the stone wall on the west side of the parking lot at the summit of Little Round Top. To the right of the cast iron “Little Round Top” sign is a large oak tree, Witness Tree 01. Immediately to its right you should be able to trace out with your eye the remains of an old walking path, no longer in use. Beyond and just to the right of the two other larges oaks standing along the trail is Witness Tree 04, a medium-sized tupelo, or black gum, tree (see photo at right).

What this Tree Witnessed

With the help of General Warren himself, Lieut. Charles Hazlett of Battery D, 5th U.S. Artillery, had somehow managed to get several of his cannon to the crest of Little Round Top. The guns began to fire towards the valley below to support the faltering Union effort. When Brig. Gen. Stephen Weed, commander of the 3rd Brigade (2nd Div., 5th Corps) was shot and paralyzed at the ledge, his friend Charles Hazlett came to console him. As Hazlett held Weed in his arms, Hazlett was killed by a bullet through the head. Weed was carried to the Weikert Farm on the Taneytown Road, where he died later that night. A monument at the ledge memorializes these two heroes of the north.

Witness Tree 04

About 20 feet above the ground, a single branch extends from the trunk straight out for only a few inches before shooting straight upwards, in a manner reminiscent of the arms of a saguaro cactus.

Witness Tree 04 Statistics

Tree Species: Tupelo
Circumference 2024: 66”
Diameter: 21”
Estimated age: 225-250 years
Estimated diameter in 1863: 6-8”

Then-and-Now Comparisons

Witness Tree 04 appears in the middle of a 1936 NPS photograph of the hill above the parking area at the summit of Little Round Top. The location of Witness Tree 04 can be seen here relative to a number of other Witness Trees at this location (see the numbered circles in black).

Labels “A” and “B” denote large stones which can be matched up in the two photographs.

The older picture was one of a number taken to record the work being performed by members of the Conservation Civilian Corps at the summit, including rebuilding the sidewalk by the stone wall and improving the walking paths. The cameraman managed to just capture the left third of the body of one of the laborers, including the man’s left leg, arm and hand, which is holding an implement of some sort.

Other Photographs

Here is a close-up of Witness Tree 04 as it appeared both in 1936 and 2025; the images are placed by side-by-side, and the lowest primary branch is aligned, so that you can see exactly how much – or perhaps we should say, “how little” – the tree has grown in 90 years. Today, the tree’s diameter is but 21 inches. We can accurately gage the diameter of the tree in 1936 to have been about 14.5 inches. Thus, the tree has been taking a whopping 13.6 years to grow each inch of diameter over the past decade, a truly glacial rate of increase!