July, 1775 saw only the earliest of attempts to describe General Washington's first moments with the American army. The documents and images available on this page offer later interpretations of the ceremony and the elm. How much do they correspond to what participants at the time observed? They are divided on this page into three categories: documents | images and objects | elms to visit.

Documents

• Joshua Slocum's Account (1844)
• Excerpt from the diary of Daneil Bigelow, a Harvard Law Student mentioning the Washington Elm (1848)
• Excerpt from the diary of Dorothy Dudley, supposedly from the time, but actually written in 1876
• A reading from an 1884 volume of the Bay State Monthly (L. L. DAME. Historic Trees: The Washington Elm; The Eliot Oak. [The Bay State monthly. / Volume 1, Issue 2, Feb., 1884])
• A Poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes (1861)
• Excerpt from historian Jared Sparks, The Life of George Washington (Boston: Little, Brown, 1852, p. 133).
• Excerpt from Washington Irving, The Life of George Washington in Five Volumes (New York: Putnam, 1837-1856, volume 2, p. 23).
• Excerpt from John L. Sibley, "The Washington Elm, in Cambridge" from The American Magazine of Useful & Entertaining Knowledge (Boston: J.L. Sibley, 1837, volume 3, p. 432). And accompanying image.
• Excerpt from Ballou's Pictorial magazine. M.M. Ballou (editor), Boston, Saturday, July 7, 1855. Vol IX., No. 1, p. 1. And accompanying image.
• Boston Globe Article (1926)

Images

• Sibley's Image (1837)
• Ballou's Image (1855)
• An 1875 photograph of the "Old Washington Elm"
• Currier and Ives's colored engraving (1878)
• An 1884 photograph from the Bay State Monthly
• An 1899 photograph of the elm, from the Library of Congress, in album prepared by Detroit Photographic Co. to use as a catalog in its office.
• A 1921 photograph of the elm, The Washington Elm File, Houghton library
• Boston Globe newspaper article from 1926 with image of the old stone table
• The Washington Elm Spoon
• A commemorative tourist map produced by the City of Cambridge, the Cambridge Historical Commission, the Cambridge Historical Society, the Massachusetts Society of the Cincinatti and the Sheraton Commander Hotel to celebrate Cambridge during the American Revolution. Its title: WASHINGTON TAKES COMMAND.
• The seal of the city of Cambridge, featuring the Washington Elm.
• Photograph of the Washington Elm today
• Photograph of the Washington Gate on the Cambridge Common
• Photograph of tablet with Washington's first orders
• Photograph of tablet showing Washington inspecting the troops

Real and Virtual Sites to Visit

• Several markers placed by the Cambridge Historical Commission dot the Cambridge Common, and billboard exhibits offer stories about Washington and Cambridge during the Revolution. View the CHC list of historical markers and visit the actual sites in Cambridge.
• Harvard University's own Fogg Museum of Art has in its possession an object shaped like a book carved out of the old elm. The object belongs to the collections of the Houghton library but was loaned to the Fogg several years ago for a historical exhibit.
• The Cambridge Historical Society is housed in the Hooper-Lee-Nichols House on Brattle Street, just a few blocks away from the Cambridge Common. A back room of the house contains a cut-out from the Washington Elm. Take a tour of the house, and you'll have a chance to learn lots about colonial architecture, and also get a chance to ask the guides for the latest version of the legend of the elm.
• Just a few doors down Brattle Street from the Hooper-Lee-Nichols house sits the Longfellow National Historic Site operated by the National Parks Service. The house was home to the nineteenth-century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. It also served as George Washington's residence and headquarters after he took control of the American Army in July, 1775. The NPS leads tours of the site laced with verses from Longfellow's poetry. You can also see some Washington paraphernalia, as well as a chair made from the old Washington Elm.
• The Cambridge room at the Cambridge Public Library contains a table made out of timbers from the Washington Elm. The CPL is just a few blocks down Broadway from Harvard. The room is generally not open to the public, but if you explain why you're visiting they may let you see the table.
• The Denver, Colorado chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution maintains a scion of the Washington Elm at the Mt. Vernon garden, a public park in South Denver. It is surrounded by an ornamental fence and described on a bronze plaque.
• In San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, a bronze tablet on the Main Drive between 4th and 6th avenues commemorates an elm that is a scion of Cambridge's Washington Elm. The marker was donated by the Sons of American Revolution, and erected in 1933. The park contains another descendant of the Washington Elm, planted in 1952.
• Another scion of Cambridge's Washington elm is planted at the University of Washington. A web-site there has a picture of the elm, planted there in 1902. The picture was taken in 1947, when the tree was almost 75 feet tall. The University of Washington also has a film telling the story of this tree and its relationship to its Cambridge parent.