My son is as much into history as I am. One day, he was telling me about how much he liked old buildings, which reminded me of an old barn I stumbled upon years ago, in a section of Valley Forge National Historical Park called Pawlings Farm. I've taken him to different areas of Valley Forge several times, but never to this section. So one Saturday morning, on our way to Target, I decided to stop by and show him the old barn.
He was fascinated by it; but on our way out, he saw something off in the woods that to me looked like the ruins of a smaller old building. Since we had plans that day, we left and went on our way.
The next day, when I asked him what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to go back and explore the area a little more. When we arrived, he pointed out a small old gravel driveway that led away from the barn, so we decided to walk down the path. As we rounded the bend, we found the partially-collapsed ruins of an old large house:
Beyond the house, the driveway continued...
...and my son pointed around the bend and said "THAT'S what I saw in the distance that I wanted to find!" THAT...was one of the largest, most magnificent trees I've ever seen.
We must have stood there in awe for about 15 minutes, walking around it, taking it all in.
When we got home, we did some searching on the internet and found this blog post: https://www.valleyforge.org/blog/post/a-bough-to-history, which claims that this tree is approximately 260-285 years old, which place it's roots (pun intended) in the middle of the Revolutionary War...which to me is the most amazing part of all of this. That blog post tells the story, so I won't rehash it here, but to see all of this in person in my opinion, knowing the fact that this tree and the surroundings are so old and relatively untouched, is absolutely surreal.
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