By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the colonists in New England had come to recognize what the Iroquois had long known: that the towering, Eastern White Pine was unrivaled among trees in its resourcefulness and grandeur.
White pine was a symbol of peace for the Iroquois. Yet it was at the center of several, sometimes violent, skirmishes between American colonists and the British Crown.
Some trees stretched close to 200 feet into the sky, high above a landscape also rich in oak, elm and hemlock. The pine had softer wood, ideal for building houses or furniture.
Its long, straight trunk was also in demand for another use: as a mainsail mast on massive ships, sometimes called “cathedrals of the sea,” said Eric Rutkow, a historian at University of Central Florida who wrote the book American Canopy, exploring America’s relationship with trees.
Compound masts, which were made of smaller pieces of wood bound together with metal, were less desirable and more expensive, Rutkow said.
But in 1691, the crown made a power grab of this natural resource: the Massachusetts Bay Charter declared that all trees bigger than 24 inches in diameter had to be reserved for the King’s Royal Navy.
Whose trees are these?
Britain had been buying lumber from the Baltic region, which was under the control of Sweden and Russia. But Parliament wanted to protect national security. This meant ensuring a steady supply of wood from within the British Empire.
“Their major concern was … if we go to war with Russia, it becomes difficult to get timbers to build the Navy at the moment when we really need to build up the Navy,” said Bowdoin College historian Strother Roberts.
The British government didn’t have the boots on the ground to even begin enforcing the laws across the vast New England landscape, Roberts said.
That changed in the 1760s, when the king appointed more general surveyors to seek out the largest trees and mark them with three strokes of an ax — a chiseled symbol called the King’s Broad Arrow.
“Can the government from 3,000 miles away tell you what you can do in your own backyard?” said Rutkow. “When you get into the question of property rights, you really get right into the core of what people get concerned about, especially in the Anglo-American tradition.”
Surveyors and loggers were locked in a cat and mouse game. As soon as some trees were marked, or before surveyors even found them, loggers would chop down and mill desirable pines.
The enforcers were loyal to the Crown. And while the policy was unpopular with their neighbors, they saw it as protecting national security, said Rutkow.
Surveyors faced insults and threats from loggers. Often, local authorities were slow to provide backup.
This low-scale rebellion eventually escalated to violence in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Two general surveyors, Elezear Burt and Elijah Lyman, marked 363 trees with the King’s Broad Arrow. Yet after two years of surveys, only 37 trees remained and could go to the Royal Navy; colonists had harvested, milled or burned the rest.
On Oct. 25, 1765, Burt and Lyman stumbled on a group of loggers hauling a massive pine to the river to send it downstream to a sawmill. The details of the confrontation were documented in Hampshire County Court records.
The surveyors confronted the men and ordered them to stop. Later that night, a mob attacked both of the king’s surveyors at their homes, an event noted in the diary of Hadley resident Josiah Pierce.
Court records show that penalties for the violence were lax.
“And from then on out, there is no further evidence that anyone even tries to enforce the White Pine Acts in Massachusetts,” Roberts said.
Ten years later, when the Revolutionary war began, the Continental Congress cut off all mast shipments to Britain.
And during the Battle of Bunker Hill, before the colonies even declared independence, the New England flag waved — with a green pine tree emblazoned in the top left corner.
