Large limbs are removed Tuesday from the sycamore on Henderson Lawn in Blacksburg.

Retired Virginia Tech plant pathology professor Jay Stipes watches as the sycamore is cut down. Stipes held court Tuesday morning at College Avenue and Main Street, answering questions about one of the trees for which he spent more than two decades caring.

Photos by Justin Cook | The Roanoke Times

Heather Bowden paints a picture of the Henderson Lawn sycamore as Jeff Dean watches as it is cut down. Both say they grew up in Blacksburg and were sad to see the tree go.

| Tonia Moxley

tonia.moxley@roanoke.com, 381-1675

BLACKSBURG -- Rain slowed but did not stop the felling of one of the town's oldest and largest trees Tuesday.

It took a sawyer from Total Tree Health Care and a crane operator less than a day to dismantle the Henderson Lawn sycamore -- a tree that is thought to date to the 1872 founding of the college that would eventually become Virginia Tech.

Until scientists study cross-sections of the trunk, the exact age of the tree will remain uncertain, retired Tech plant pathology professor Jay Stipes said.

Stipes held court Tuesday morning at College Avenue and Main Street, answering questions about one of the trees for which he spent more than two decades caring.

Standing about 100 feet tall with a trunk diameter of about 5 feet, the sycamore had been called a landmark feature of Blacksburg and Tech and was one of a few naturally occurring trees that remained on campus.

But tree experts from across the university agreed that the sycamore was dying and posed a threat to those who frequent the busy sidewalks of College Avenue.

While wild American sycamores in rural areas can live up to 600 years, the pressures of urban life stunted the Tech tree's growth and weakened its constitution. A common fungal infection combined with old age doomed it, Stipes said.

People gathered on the street Tuesday, snapping photos with cellphones, iPods and digital cameras as nervous workers herded them through the danger zone.

The disassembling of the old giant fired the imagination of those who came to pay their last respects.

Jack Goslee, a woodworker, snagged a section of a smaller branch. He estimated its weight at about 75 pounds.

"I'll let it speak to me for a while" before carving it into some kind of artwork, he said.

To Goslee, the clustered onlookers took on the aspect of mourners.

"I'm looking at it like a funeral, people coming down here," he said.

Longtime downtown business owner Chris Kappas remembered the tree from his childhood.

"I grew up above Harley's Shoe Shop. I would go there and play hide-and-seek with my friends who lived on Progress Street," Kappas said.

Harley's shop closed in 2008, and the old cobbler, himself a Blacksburg landmark, has also passed away.

But some six decades later, Kappas recalled trying to climb the 14 or so feet to the spot where the main trunk branched into two.

"I never made it," he said, chuckling.

"We've always considered it part of downtown. We hate to see it cut down, but we watched it die over the last few years," he said.

For Laurie Sallee, the tree has been the backdrop of her life in Blacksburg since the mid-1980s. She remembers it and the lawn as "neutral territory, and we were all family up on the hill," where college students went to play guitar, meet dates or just relax.

She also recalled the town characters who have walked beneath the tree's canopy -- of "Meter Maid Mary," who left countless parking tickets on Sallee's Volkswagen bug parked at expired meters outside Gillie's; of "Swampfoot John," who walked downtown barefoot; and of "Walk Around Town Steve," who just walked a lot.

"I'm just really sorry to see it go," Sallee said of the tree.

But trees are not just witnesses to history. History is written in the wood grain. From the rings, scientists can trace climate and weather trends, and even date injuries to the tree itself, Stipes said.

More than that, old trees are repositories for human memory. It is likely that all the 200,000 living Tech alumni know this tree, and that hundreds of thousands of those who have died also knew it over its long life.

"We are attached to trees because we fear our mortality," Stipes said. "And a tree that lives that long gives us a sense of immortality."

Tech facilities operations director Mark Helms could not be reached Monday or Tuesday, so it's unclear what will happen to the salvageable parts of the tree.

But Quintin McClellan, owner of Total Tree Health Care, said his crew was directed to take the wood to the Tech landfill, where it will be stored until a decision is made about its fate.