The logs of this great tree proved too huge to handle, even after being split asunder by blasting powder, crushing down a number of trucks, and were left to rot where they lay. Measured when prone, the stem was 270 feet in length, and considering that the stump was cut breast high, the tree was probably close to 276 feet from root to tip. The stump is still visible and well worthy of a visit.
In addition to boasting of the biggest pine in the Commonwealth, one of the biggest red hemlocks also grew in Sugar Valley, in the centre of Kleckner’s woods, until it was destroyed by bark peelers in 1898. It dwarfed the other original trees in the grove, mostly superb white hemlocks, and an idea of its size can be gained when it is stated that “breast high” it had a circumference of 30 feet.
When Billy Dowdy, an eccentric Seneca Indian, was in Sugar Valley he told ’Squire Mark the story of the Grandfather Pine, then recently felled, and while the Indian did not visit the “fallen monarch” on that occasion, he refrained from so doing because he said he could not bear the sight. The greatest disaster that had yet befallen the Indians had occurred, one that they might never recover from, and meant their final elimination as factors in American history.
Dowdy seemed unnerved when he heard the story of the demolition of the colossal pine, and it took several visits to the famous Achenbach distillery to steady his nerves so that he could relate its history to his old and tried friend the ’Squire. In the evening, by the fireside, showing emotion that rarely an Indian betrays, he dramatically recited the story of the fallen giant.
Long years ago, in the very earliest days of the world’s history, the great earth spirit loved the evening star, but it was such an unusual and unnatural attachment, and so impossible of consummation that the despairing spirit wished to end the cycle of existence and pass into oblivion so as to forget his hopeless love. Accordingly, with a blast of lightning he opened his side and let his anguish flow away. The great gaping wound is what we of today call Penn’s Cave, and the never ending stream of anguish is the wonderful shadowy Karoondinha, now renamed John Penn’s Creek.
As time went on fresh hopes entered the subterranean breast of the great earth spirit, and new aspirations towards the evening star kindled in his heart of hearts. His thoughts and yearnings were constantly onward and upward towards the evening star. He sought to bridge the gulf of space and distance that separated him from the clear pure light of his inspiration. He yearned to be near, even if he could not possess the calm and cold constellation so much beyond him. He cried for an answer, but none came, and thought that it was distance that caused the coldness, and certainly such had caused the great disappointment in the past.
His heart was set on reaching the evening star, to have propinquity with the heavens. Out of his strong hopes and deep desires came a tall and noble tree, growing in eastern Sugar Valley, a king among its kindred, off there facing the shining, beaming star. This tree would be the symbol of earth’s loftiest and highest aspirations, the bridge between the terrestrial and the celestial bodies. It was earth’s manliest, noblest and cleanest aspiration, standing there erect and immobile, the heavy plates of the bark like gilt-bronze armor, the sparse foliage dark and like a warrior’s crest.
The Indians, knowing full well the story of the hopeless romance of the earth spirit and the evening star, or Venus, as the white men called it, venerated the noble tree as the connecting link between two manifestations of sublimity. They only visited its proximity on sacred occasions because they knew that the grove over which it dominated was the abode of spirits, like all groves of trees of exceptional size and venerable age.
The cutting away of most of the bodies of original pines has circumscribed the abode of the spiritual agencies until they are now almost without a lodgement, and must go wailing about cold and homeless until the end of time, unless spiritual insight can touch our materialistic age and save the few remaining patches of virgin trees standing in the valley of the Karoondinha, the “Stream of the Never Ending Love”, now known by the prosaic cognomen of “Penn’s Valley”.
The Tom Motz tract is no more, the Wilkenblech, the Bowers and the Meyer groves are all but annihilated. Where will the spirits rest when the last original white pine has been ripped into boards at The Forks, now called Coburn? No wonder that Artist Shearer exclaimed, “The world is aesthetically deal!”[deal!”]