A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1083 entries
witness tree
A witness tree is a tree used as a legal marker of a boundary or a survey point. American public land surveyors blazed and recorded the nearest trees to each corner, noting species, size, and bearing, so that if the corner post was lost, the corner could be reestablished from the trees. The term is also used loosely for any old tree that stood through a historical event.
Etymology
The English term is from surveying and the sense of witness is the legal one: The tree gives evidence about where the line is. The blaze cut into it is on this site under blaze, and the practice was formalized in the American rectangular survey from the 1780s onward.
Notes
Those survey records turned out to be an ecological archive nobody intended. Because surveyors recorded the species and size of witness trees across the whole of the American interior before it was cleared, the notebooks are the best available reconstruction of what the pre-settlement forest and prairie actually looked like, and they have been digitized and mapped at continental scale.