13 & 14 – Fredericksburg Artillery

How to Find Witness Trees 13 and 14

There are two white oak trees standing in the middle of the strip of grass between the guns of Crenshaw’s Battery and the Fredericksburg Artillery to its south. The tree closer to the Fredericksburg Artillery (the greenish bronze Napoleon on your right) is white oak Witness Tree 13. 

A few yards to the southeast of Tree 13, just across the stone wall, is a shagbark hickory tree – distinguished as all shagbarks are by its severely “peeling” bark.

Then-and-Now Comparison

Both Witness Trees 13 and 14 appear in a single photograph which was published by “Tipton and Blocher” in a 1911 soft-cover picture album entitled Gettysburg: The Pictures and the Story. An interesting feature of the 1911 image is that it is possible to match up many of the rocks appearing in the stone wall in that picture with those that can be seen in a modern recreation of that photo. Such a matching-up of rocks (which of course are the same size today as they were a century ago) allows us to make a particularly accurate estimation of the growth rate, and hence the age, of these two trees. 

An example of an especially distinctive such rock is labeled “A” in the photographs.

Note how slowly Witness Tree 14 has grown over the past century and more. It is worth taking a moment to compare the branches of the tree in the two images: you can match up the primary branches quite easily!

Other Photos