Then and Now: The death of the Doughnut Tree

You have to be more than half a century old to remember when New England’s towering elm trees came down, and a couple of decades older than that to recall how stubbornly they resisted splitting with a hammer and steel wedges. When George French photographed Fryeburg, Maine’s world-famous Doughnut Tree for Maine’s Development Commission in the 1950s, it was probably over 125 years old. Had it not been for the importation of elm logs from Europe it might have lasted the better part of another century, but those logs brought the disease that killed it and most of our other elms.

Isaiah Warren, a farmer and entrepreneur who built this house on Portland Street, filled it with at least two sons and six daughters. If he did not plant the tree, he at least allowed it to grow. He may also have trained one limb into the curl that made the tree famous, but if it occurred naturally, someone later braced it with a cable slung through the fork. Into the early 1960s, parents traveling to Fryeburg from adjoining towns found it productive of passenger satisfaction to swing down Oxford Street and enter the village from the east, via Warren Street, to let the kids have a look at the tree that adorned postcards across the U.S.