Old oak was a landmark on Nayatt Road

Tree was a casualty of Nayatt Road repaving project

Posted 11/22/18

Burton Greifer estimates that the tree, a stately red oak that grew dangerously close to the northern edge of Nayatt Road, was 116 years old when a crew brought it down last month.

The chainsaws …

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Old oak was a landmark on Nayatt Road

Tree was a casualty of Nayatt Road repaving project

Posted

Burton Greifer estimates that the tree, a stately red oak that grew dangerously close to the northern edge of Nayatt Road, was 116 years old when a crew brought it down last month.

The chainsaws lopped off branches and sectioned up the wide trunk on Oct. 4 — less than 10 hours of work to remove a tree that had been more than a century in the making. Once a shady haven, the tree became a casualty of the DOT's Nayatt Road repaving project.

Mr. Greifer, whose home sits a few dozen feet from where the tree grew, snapped photos of the dismantling effort. First, workers used pole-saws to trim the low-hanging branches. Then a helmet-clad man steered himself around the tree inside a cherry-picker, pausing to remove one large limb after another. 

Before long, only the trunk remained, and then that, too, was gone.

"I missed the tree for about a week," said Mr. Greifer, when asked how he felt about its removal. "But I'm accustomed to it now."

The handsome oak drew the attention of most west-bound motorists on Nayatt Road. The tree stood not so much beside Nayatt, as it hovered over it — a three-foot-tall stone wall surrounded the tree's base and pressed hard against the white-painted fog line.

A longtime resident, Mr. Greifer said he had returned home on more than one occasion to find a few stones from the wall scattered into the roadway: a clear indication that someone's car had traveled a bit too close to the wall and clipped some of the stones. 

"One time, there was a lady who was driving and reaching for a Kleenex," said Mr. Greifer, remembering a more serious accident. "She got the Kleenex. She got the wall also."

Officials from the Rhode Island Department of Transportation quickly recognized the tree's location as a problem when planning out the Nayatt Road repaving project. Engineers called for the tree to be removed and for the stone wall to be pushed back away from the road's edge. 

"They said they're going to rebuild the stone wall," he said. 

History lesson

Shortly after the crew from Stanley Tree had finished its work and pulled away, Mr. Greifer walked out to the tree's stump. He looked down at the rings and began to count.

"I thought it would be interesting to learn the age of the tree by counting the annual rings," Mr. Greifer wrote in an email. "I learned that the tree was 116 years old."

Mr. Greifer said the tree's rings also offered clues of the previous Nayatt Road paving project. 

"Beginning from the center of the tree, the rings were quite large, measuring one quarter of an inch between rings," he wrote. "At the count of sixty rings, a strange thing happened. The rings were no longer spaced at quarter inch intervals, but much closer together, like one thirty-second-of-an-inch apart. The count to the periphery of the trunk included seventy more rings.  

"So at sixty rings, I conclude that something must have happened to the tree, which inhibited its growth. And that would have been the grading of Nayatt, which would have destroyed part of the root system. Using an algorithm I learned in the second grade, I concluded that the restructuring of Nayatt occurred in 1948. My house was built in 1958. And the history of the tree is concluded with its death, or more accurately, its murder,  in 2018. Nothing like a little history lesson."

Mr. Greifer estimated that the stone wall was also constructed in 1948, concurrent with the earlier Nayatt Road project.

In with the new

Mr. Greifer said a work crew recently returned to the site of the old oak tree and dug out its root system. The spectacle again captured Mr. Greifer's attention and his camera. 

Mr. Greifer said many of the people who live in the area have spoken about the old oak. Some remembered it fondly. One woman, said Mr. Greifer, said she was glad to have it removed.

"She said 'Now I have a good view, and fewer leaves to rake,'" he said.

Mr. Greifer said that when the Nayatt Road project is completed, he plans to replace the old oak with a new tree.

"Maybe an Asiatic ginkgo or a tulip tree," he said. 

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A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.