There is a map drawn on the inside cover of an old book. On its handwritten pages, the book tells the story of the earliest days of Brentwood’s schools; the schools of a hamlet in the middle of Long Island, some forty miles from New York City.
On the map we see part of the first school, an octagonal building erected among the pine barrens more than a century and a half ago. Across from it, along the fence at the edge of the school yard are three circles. Each is labeled: Abraham Lincoln, William Cullen Bryant, and J. Fennimore Cooper. What do these names mean?
Two are authors, one is a president. Charles Codman, the man who sketched the map, drew it to illustrate, a “Record of Trees Planted.” A quotation on the page reads: “The Friday following the 1 st day of May in each year shall hereafter be known throughout the state as Arbor Day.” The quote comes from a 1889 proclamation by the State Board of Education.
Then, Arbor Day was a new holiday, aimed at the celebration of trees – especially the planting of new trees.
In addition to planting trees, the students would name them. The three names, then, were the names given by the Brentwood students given to their trees. William Cullen Bryant was a Norway maple planted in 1890. J. Fenimore Cooper, a sugar maple planted in 1891. Abraham Lincoln was another maple planted in 1892.
Interestingly, Codman seems to have been the main supporter of Arbor Day celebrations from the beginning. Codman was a radical, part of the original Utopian settlement which grew into Brentwood, a spiritualist, positivist, artist and painter, but, also, paradoxically, a stalwart of the community, and art teacher beloved by the students.
While there is no record of a planting in 1889, there is an entry for a school board meeting on that day as well as a a resolution by Codman that Arbor Day be celebrated by May 3, 1889. The entry was later crossed off. There was likely no celebration that first year.
Evidently, Codman persevered, though. We have a listing of the first three trees, approvals in the minutes for other Arbor Days, and even a handwritten Arbor Day program of events from 1902, including a surprising array of readings, recitations, and songs, and Codman as a featured speaker.
Holiday Origins
It may be that the announcement of the first New York Arbor Day came too abruptly for the school to plan something. After all, the earliest suggestions for how to plan Arbor Day celebrations were fairly elaborate. Besides planting trees (if unable to plant a tree a school could substitute a “vine or shrub, or an ivy”), teachers should prepare: two or three poetic compositions set to music to be memorized and recited by the students. “One of these might be a hymn in praise of the natural world.”
Another would be a song of “dedication and appreciation” about the tree planted on the day. And the third, something to be sung by the children as they marched “through the locality they wish to improve by the planting of trees, etc.” Although the initial “Act to Encourage Arboriculture” was passed earlier, the circular announcing Arbor Day began to be circulated March 21st.
Only having a month to plan such festivities, must have been a tall order. Organizing a few students to sing and memorize poems, much less to schedule entire classes to march up and down the streets singing odes to the natural world, requires time. By the next year – and certainly by 1902 – they were ready.
The idea for Arbor Day appeared during a time of tumult for the native world. Logging and the expansion of railroads and industry were all signs of progress, expansion and settlement, but also contributed to the felling of forests. While Americans were glad to find new places to live and improvements in their standards of living, they were disturbed by the harm to the natural world they had once enjoyed.
Part of the goal of Arbor Day was to save and expand nature by preserving and restoring forests and trees. Whereas Earth Day today focuses on the dangers of pollution, carbon emissions, and climate change, Arbor Day identified the two worst dangers to trees as “fire and wasteful lumbering.” In Brentwood they had seen both.
Originally founded as home for the Utopian community of Modern Times, the owners who sold the land had, before handing it over to the first settlers, sold the lumber – in the form of the tall pine trees furnished Long Island’s central pine barrens. With the pines gone, the settlers then had to pull up or “grub” the persistent dwarf scrub-oaks that remained in order to farm.
This part of Long Island had only really started to become settled with the advent of the railroad, first completed in the 1840s. With the trains came sparks shooting off the steam engines. Forest fires which could rage for miles and passengers seeing them blazing in the distance. Early villages were no strangers to fighting desperate, foot-by-foot battles to keep the flames at bay.
Even before settlement, there were stories of Native Americans periodically fires to flush out game, clear space, and as a part of a yearly tradition. The pine barren environment itself includes a number of curious plant and insect species which require fires in order to complete their life-cycle.
Today, smaller fires are intentionally checked to clear excess growth and paradoxically promote the growth of such habitats.
Celebrating Arbor Day
Over the years, Brentwood’s Arbor Days featured a variety of songs, poems, and recitations. In the 1902 program, a number of the names are familiar to those who have studied the history of the place and include Holmes, Doherty, and Watson. Barrett Studley, the son of a noted real-estate developer would become a pilot and fly in the First World War.
His book How to Fly was one of the first guides on the subject, and a popular guide for student pilots. In 1902, still a student himself, he read the poem “Hail to the Tree.” Gladys Ross, daughter of Dr. William Ross, one of Brentwood’s most prominent citizens (he had been involved in the establishment of all sorts of institutions from the golf club to sanitarium, schools to cemetery) read “The Yellow Violet” a poem by William Cullen Bryant.
When beeches buds begin to swell
And woods the blue-birds warble know,
The yellow violet’s modest bell
Peeps from the last year’s bells below.
Bryant, the namesake of Brentwood’s first Arbor Day tree, was America’s great poet of nature. Today he is most often read by students for his widely-anthologized lyric “Thanatopsis” – a precocious reflection on death by Bryant the boy. In his own day, Bryant was famous for his hymns to nature. His prose Picturesque America, an illustrated two volume overview of nature’s beautiful natural places, was a bestseller.
Partly through influences of poets like Bryant, American’s began to develop an authentic appreciation for the natural world. Famous naturalists like Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir had their appreciation of the natural world shaped by the ideas, culture, and literature of this time.
Bryant’s poem “The Planting of an Apple-Tree” was an especial inspiration for the practice of planting trees. “What plant we in this apple tree?” is his refrain. The answers come: a thrush, the home for a bird and her chicks, a shadow from the sun at noon, shelter from the rain, sweet fruit to pick, blossoms for the bee, and flowers for the sick.
George Ayling is listed on that Arbor Day program of 1902 as having read a poem “The Robin.” George had grown up in Brentwood. He was probably even one of the children in attendance at some of the earliest Arbor Days. In 1902, George was 14. Six years later he was hired by the Brentwood Realty Company for an extraordinary project.
Ayling was hired to plant four train carloads of white pine trees (Pinus strobus) along Brentwood road, the long road running the length of Brentwood and through the most historic areas of the town. It was said that George planted ten-thousand trees in total.
Arboreal Reminders
In the north, Brentwood road becomes Washington avenue, and it is here where many of Ayling’s original plantings still survive. The trees bring to mind the original forest, parts of which survive in the Edgewood Preserve and Bishop tract, remnants of the fascinating primordial ecosystem of Long Island. Today, at least seventy of Ayling’s trees, towering hundreds of feet high, remain.
These “Cathedral Pines” have been acknowledged by the American Forestry Association, a Town of Islip Survey, and in Randall and Clapin’s Famous and Historic Trees, as historic landmarks in their own right.
Ayling’s trees are a surviving tribute to Brentwood’s earliest Arbor Day as well as a unique practice of honoring the natural world. Of course we still have Arbor Day today, but in these earliest days, we see a holiday with a unique flavor and uniquely expressive of the time and ideas in which it came to be.
Today the Cathedral Pines are a reminder of the earliest forests which both intimidated settlers, but also enticed them with the belief that the scent of pines mingled with the breeze from the bay could forestall and even treat then incurable ailments like tuberculosis.
For years, the date of Arbor Day was changed from state to state and even, at times, from year to year. In 1970, a new environmental movement saw the advent of the first Earth Day. Two years later President Nixon set a day for a National Arbor Day, a date earlier than the traditional New York date of the first Friday after the first day in May. Today Americans celebrate the holiday on the last Friday in April.
Today, we are rediscovering new ways to appreciate, explore, and preserve the natural world, including genres like the documentary and new ideas such as the native plant movement and organic agriculture.
Even today, though, the planting of a tree is an act we often underappreciated in its simple power. Trees are, in one way, perfectly ordinary parts of our lives and landscape; this makes it easy to forget how extraordinary they are.
Trees are life-forms both ubiquitous and strange. They are critical in their role in our biological existence. Trees play a role in the shaping of history and growth of civilizations and cultures. Individual trees we see today may even serve as a living link to men and women of history; people we never imagined any more physically real than the words on the pages of a book.
These trees may have been planted by men and women who remain only names to us, but who were once children singing and planting on an Arbor Day long passed. The tree they planted, the tree they named, though the name is now forgotten, may still live.
Photos, from above: An oak at the Edgewood Preserve (Peter Ward, 2024); a program from 1902 Arbor Day (Historical Collection Brentwood Public Library); and a group of pines at the Edgewood Preserve (Peter Ward, 2024).
