The cutline on this undated photograph from the Observer-Reporter tells us “members of the Waynesburg Moose erected the community tree on the courthouse plaza Sunday morning.”
What Sunday morning? Hard to tell because the date has been trimmed from the clipping. But when Waynesburg Prosperous and Beautiful became involved with the community Christmas tree project 13 years ago, the Friday after Black Friday became the set up day, so it has to be older than that.
The cutline names names: the tree was donated by Robert Levo of Dark Hollow Road and the Moose had also helped set up a holiday tree donated by Mrs. Stewart Edwards of Morningside at Greene County Memorial Hospital that year.
Moose Lodge administrator Mike Harmon’s best guess is this newspaper clipping is from somewhere between 1978 and 1983. It’s just one of the many memories of Christmas trees past that are in Lodge archives, including photographs of what it takes to harvest something this big, using the boom truck that Equitable Gas eventually donated to the county.
“We trim it up a bit so we can get into the base then go up and connect the hoist to the tree so that it will hopefully balance to a horizontal position when cut,” Harmon explained. “We try to place the worst side on the bed of the truck because the branches break under its own weight and the further we have to travel the more damage to the tree. When we are erecting the tree in town, we cut the base to fit in a hole in the courthouse steps, move the hookup to the right of the tree and place it. We secure it as much as possible without taking away from its appearance. However one year it did blow over and needed put back up.”
One of the photographs Harmon shared was of a gorgeous spruce on Nettle Hill that didn’t make the cut because it was too far from town. In another undated photo, that year’s tree wranglers can be seen posing amidst the cone-studded branches of the downed Norway spruce that would soon be on its way to town.
How about this year’s tree? It’s growing on the corner of Schoolhouse Road, Rogersville, in the backyard of Robert Crouse. Crouse, who turned 90 this year, planted it as a seedling in 1985 when he moved in with his mom from the family home next door.
Crouse said he first noticed it growing against the wall of the family home in 1977, most likely planted there by a neighborhood squirrel and decided to mow around it and watch it grow. “It was just a splinter – about six inches high. I don’t know why but I just let it be.”
Once transplanted from the shady wall to the edge of the sunny back yard it began to grow in earnest. As it grew ever taller and fuller over the years, Crouse began removing lower branches in order to mow under it. Last year he thought about donating it to be the Courthouse Christmas tree because it was mature, and like most evergreens that are grown as ornamentals out of their natural habitat, susceptible to blights as they age.
Crouse, who was a logger with W A Wilson Staves in East Vies after he graduated from Center Township High School in 1949, makes an educated guess that his tree is well over 40 feet high.
But we won’t really know until Mark Harmon and his crew of Lodge members and county workers arrive to get it ready for its drive to town to be this year’s Christmas Tree on the courthouse steps.
