Expedition To Find The Oldest Living Thing In New England

The Eastern Hemlocks of the Mohawk Trail - the 2nd annual Expedition To Find the Oldest Living Thing in New England

What is the oldest living thing in New England? Could it be a yeast beneath the soil of the Connecticut River Valley? A Greenland Shark in Vineyard Sound? A lichen atop Mount Desert Island? An extremophile microbe under a Smugglers’ Notch moraine? A quahog in the Bay of Fundy? A clonal grove of beech along the Canadian border? An albino sperm whale in Nantucket Sound? 

Could it be Tree 618, the 400+ year old black tupelo gum tree in Epping, New Hampshire, the tree that scores 243 points on the Big Tree Scale, and that our expedition members located, scrutinized, measured, and documented for science in 2024?  Or could there be something findable by science in New England that is even older than Tree 618?

Members of Long Now Boston and our friends set out in April 2026 on an Expedition to Find the Oldest Living Thing in New England led by Grant Stephen and Steven Wardell, seeking the answers to these questions. This year’s expedition began with researching narrower questions like “What kinds of trees could survive 400+ years, including the pre-industrial period when wood was our primary source of material for housing, goods, cooking, and heating?”

Settlers from Europe to New England from the 16th century onward were hungry for land. In New England, colonials took down most of the old growth forests in order to live on the land and create homes, towns, farms, pasture land, and more. Photos from the late 19th century show vast and hilly areas of New England completely shorn of trees even up to the hilltops. Those of us who live in New England often live on land that has been reforesting for 100 years and a walk in the woods frequently takes one past miles of old “thrown” stone walls that mark the borders of farm fields that are now full of tall trees.

For a tree of great age to have survived this juncture to be found by us today, it would have had to have missed the gaze of the New England farmer. And according to research that we did, that typically meant that the tree was either in swampy land like the swamp-resistant black tupelo gum tree or on a steep hillside like the hardy hemlock. Either way, the land the tree stood on was not an attractive candidate for a New Englander to fell the tree on for the wood or turn the land into sheep pasture.

The tupelo looks the part of a venerable grandee, typically attaining a great height, a great girth of the trunk, and a great expanse of the crown, usually accompanied by problems like branches that were lost centuries ago that have let extensive decay seep into the vital center of the tree giving clues to the age.

Hemlocks on the other hand have a deceptively young appearance for their age making the ancient ones harder to spot in the forest and harder to guess their age from the outside. Hemlocks may be born in shady areas and may stay in a young tree form without getting much sun and without growing much for decades, only adding narrow rings to their girth, while waiting for surrounding trees to die, only then to make their way into full sunlight and begin growing strongly. Hemlocks on hills may find the soil to be shallow and rocky, further limiting their growth. But this long adolescence means that an ancient tree may not be especially tall or girthy and may look like it couldn’t be more than 200 years old but may nevertheless be much, much older. And as evergreen conifers, hemlocks also don’t produce a great expanse of a crown or seem to let in as much decay to the vital core so their age can’t be guessed from these clues either.

We heard rumors that out in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, there are groves of ancient Eastern Hemlocks. And that several such groves have been sighted on hilltops in Mohawk Trail State Forest, one of New England’s most scenic parks along Route 2, New England’s most scenic byway. But the information about these groves was disappointingly incomplete. While there were several reports of ancient hemlocks sighted in the vicinity of Todd Mountain, there were no clear indications on maps of where exactly they were located, or on which trail, and whether the groves were even visible or approachable from the trails. The rumored hemlocks were claimed to be over 400 years old, with some possibly over half-a-millennium.

With no further information to be gleaned from research, the five expedition members took Route 2 out from Boston into Western Massachusetts. Over the course of the 70 miles between the Connecticut River in Central Massachusetts and Williamstown, Route 2 takes on the name Mohawk Trail Scenic Byway. The byway today traces the ancient Mahican-Mohawk foot trail long used by Native Americans to follow the path of game animals.

The team met up for lunch at a restaurant in Charlemont on the outskirts of the Mohawk Trail State Forest for some refreshment and fellowship and to share information about the day’s goal of finding a grove of ancient hemlocks on a mountaintop. Then the team drove to a State Forest campground nearby. We asked passersby in town and at the campground where to look for ancient hemlocks, but no-one knew of stories of ancient undisturbed groves of hemlocks high on the hills. We drove past the campground headquarters, which was closed as was the camping. In the parking lot the team got out our special gear - hiking boots, bug repellant, sun hats, compases, park maps, saved electronic maps on smartphones, clinometers, and hiking poles.

With no specific directions available, the team walked through the campground of many empty campsites until the promising-looking Indian Trail trailhead appeared, leading up to Todd Mountain, which was 1,000’ above the nearby river valley and 1,700’ above sea level.

As the team intrepidly began the trail climbing up the south side of a ridge near Todd Mountain, several challenges emerged. The first was that the hillside and trail were very steep and not maintained, and the trail itself was narrow and ran along the mountainside with a steep drop on the downhill side. This posed the challenges of the steep climb tiring the team members before we came within sighting distance of hemlocks, and also of a false step’s proving dangerous. We were also concerned that there was a carpet of leaves covering the smooth granite bedrock, leaves that could slide and give way under the foot of even the most experienced hiker.  These difficulties could explain why even the locals that we’d run into didn’t know about groves of ancient hemlocks on the mountainside down the road from them - because any groves were inaccessibly difficult to reach.

The trail was marked by blue trail blazes in the shape of a triangular arrowhead pointing the way. At one point halfway up the mountain, the blue arrowhead pointed straight upward indicating that the trail’s climb was so steep as to be nearly vertical!

The forest we hiked through was comprised primarily of maple and oak trees which were growing buds but which did not yet have a canopy of leaves, making visibility on the steep hillside high. We kept a keen lookout for hemlock trees, which are evergreen and which would have stood out, but to our disappointment we didn’t see any. We had hoped to find many hemlocks and to busy ourselves with measurements to determine which were the oldest. But instead after hours of hiking we had not seen a single one.

The expedition had a secondary challenge:  New England granite, which is famous worldwide for its hardness and which is also also symbolic of the hardiness of New Englanders, is some of the oldest rock in the world, especially the rock of the Berkshire foothills of Western Massachusetts. Some of this bedrock is metamorphic gneiss formed in the Grenville Orogeny 1.25 billion years ago. We also sought to find and document exposed examples of this bedrock. It wasn’t too long hiking up the sheer mountainside that the team came across a number of exposed slabs of bedrock worn smooth over time, which we considered could be from this old formation.

E

xhausted by the rough terrain and the steep trail, the team stopped for breaks repeatedly and tried to work out when we would have to turn back in order to get to the cars in daylight. Finally near the top the team made the call to continue another 30 minutes before turning around so as not to be caught on a mountainside at dusk.

The team continued on with the new deadline in mind, and within about 15 more minutes of hiking we came to the top of the ridgeline.  Now able to overlook the north side of the mountain we discovered we had stumbled into a large grove of tall, old-looking hemlock trees. Success! And in the last few minutes of the day’s hike.

The team enjoyed the view of the grove:  over 60 ancient Eastern hemlocks surrounded by hardwood trees that happily didn’t have leaves yet. After the group examined several trees, one particular tree stood out for its height and girth, and for its aged looking bark, so the team decided to focus on this particular tree. We calculated a height of approximately 160 feet and AI photo imaging estimated the age of the tree as 250-400 years old.

We trekked back down, which was even more treacherous and harder on the knees than going up – our missions accomplished to our exhausted but smiling satisfaction.

Future steps in the project to find the oldest living thing in New England include searching out other old trees in obscure corners of New England that have the potential to be even older than the trees we found in our first two expeditions. Further research should be done on other candidates for the oldest living things in the region including looking at habitats for Greenland sharks, underground funguses, and extremophile microbes in caves.