by Marty Green ·
Friday, April 17, 2026
Favreau Forestry cuts down an aged elm tree in front of the Harvard Public Library, April 10, after the tree was determined to be rotting at the base. It will be replaced by a new elm later this spring. (Photos by Lisa Aciukewicz)
A towering elm near the library was felled by a work crew from Favreau Forestry of Sterling last week, because rot detected at the tree’s base made it unsafe for the heavily used public area. Brian Favreau estimated the elm’s age at 165 years, meaning it was probably a tall, young tree when the Old Bromfield School was built in 1874.
The four-man crew worked throughout the chilly morning Thursday, April 9, as the operator of a big, multisection crane removed one huge branch after another. No longer does a person need to go up in a wobbly bucket and struggle to reach a branch with a handheld chainsaw. Now the chainsaw is mounted at the end of the crane itself, right below the jaws that clamp the branch to be cut. And every aspect of the work is skillfully controlled from the driver’s seat on the ground. Once the massive sections are cut and lowered to the ground, another machine picks them up and feeds them into a chipper.
That the old elm survived as long as it did is a tribute to the Harvard Elm Commission, which protected it from disease for decades. Dutch elm disease arrived in the United States in a shipment of lumber from Europe in 1928. Over the next 60 years, the disease killed about three-fourths of the elms in North America.
Harvard’s Elm Commission was established in 1974 to protect the town-owned elm trees on the Common, the Center Cemetery, and the school grounds, as well as some nearby trees on state-owned land. Under the early leadership of Anne and Bill Phair, the Elm Commission injected the elms with a fungicide developed at the University of Minnesota. The injection equipment itself was invented by Bill Phair and became widely used by arborists.
Bill Calderwood, who has chaired the Elm Commission since 2001, said the commission still uses that fungicide and it has been “incredibly successful.” None of the protected trees have died of Dutch elm disease in recent years.
The problem now, Calderwood said, is more likely to be rot, as it was for the tree by the library. An arborist had found rot in the upper branches of that elm back in 2005 or 2006, Calderwood said. The commission then had the branches cabled for safety, which preserved the tree for another 20 years. But nothing could be done about the recent rot at the base. Tree Warden JC Ferguson estimated the tree’s removal might cost about $3,000, which will come from his budget.
But that is not the end of the elm story. Ferguson wrote in an email, “We have a stake in the ground for a replacement tree’s proposed location. We plan to plant in May, and the current replacement we have in mind is a disease-resistant elm known as the Jefferson.”