Piece By Piece, Fallen Tree Becomes 'Living History'

The tree, dead on the ground nearly two years now, is still very much alive to Nicholas and Pam Cole.

It lives in a table made from an 8-inch-thick slice of its trunk, a table just the right size for the grandkids to use when they play on the porch.

It lives in a beautifully turned bowl, several vases, a candle holder, Christmas ornaments and an urn. The Coles cherish these and other gifts from the artists who made them out of pieces of the tree that fell in their Marietta yard during a freak windstorm in June 2009.

“We’ve got most of their names in here,” said Pam Cole, holding a black spiral notebook. “Men and women who came and got a piece of it.

“We had one stipulation,” she added.  “Please make us something out of it that can be passed down through the generations. And that way it lives on.  It becomes more like a living history.”

If you think that sounds like a sappy way to talk about a tree, think again.  This was no ordinary tree.

It was a Georgia Champion Tree, so honored by the Georgia Forestry Commission in 2007. It was a Western incense cedar, native to the West Coast of the country but rare in Georgia.

It was huge–maybe 120 feet tall.  And it was old–maybe 200 years old, likely one of many planted in the 1830s when the original house was built on the property.  Incense cedars grow slowly and could have been 20 years old or older when brought to Georgia.

The original house, and some of the incense cedars, were burned by Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman during the Civil War.

The Cole family bought the property after the war in 1868 and has lived on it since.   In 1907, Nicholas Cole’s grandfather built the house that still stands on Cole Street at the intersection of North Marietta Parkway.

Nicholas Cole, who was raised in the house, remembers at least four other cedar stumps to the north of the house, and the city cut down two more when the parkway was built.

Two of the original incense cedars–the state champion and a smaller sister–still stood on the property that night in June 2009 when the storm hit.

“It was straight-line winds hitting the house,” Cole said. “I was in a front room holding windows shut. It was a tremendous wind. I did not hear the tree come down. It didn’t tip over and crash. It was less than two seconds from the time it was up and it was over.”

The next morning a parade began–neighbors, friends and people just driving by stopped to check out the huge fallen tree.

“We should have been like Mayes-Ward [Funeral Home],” Pam Cole said with a laugh. “We should have done a condolence book. People were coming by and saying, ‘We’re so sorry it came down.’ ”

Many people took little branches of the tree as mementos. “We looked at it and said, oh, dear Lord, how are we going to clean all this up,” Pam Cole said.  “This is tons of wood.”

The Coles talked to friends and several tree experts and came up with the idea to offer pieces of the tree to woodworkers and other artists.

“We got online and got word out through the local wood-turners guide and woodworkers,” Nicholas Cole said. “We immediately started getting answers, people coming to the door. It spread quickly.”

They took large, twisted branches for yard sculptures.  They sawed off slices of the trunk for bigger projects.  And the professionals came back with their gifts, filling the Cole house with warm, golden-colored memories. “We’ve gotten to know some very nice people,” Nicholas Cole said.

The most remarkable of the new friendships began by chance. Randy and Pam Kemp, who live in Peachtree City, were driving home one afternoon after watch their teenage daughter, Charlotte, play in a tennis tournament in Cobb County. 

“I wasn’t really lost, I had a pretty good idea of how to get home,” Randy Kemp, a Delta pilot who does woodworking as a hobby, remembered last week. “Charlotte was driving, and we happened to pass the tree.”  They turned around.  “I rang the bell and spoke to Pam.”

Pam Cole picks up the story from there.

“They introduced themselves, and Randy said he was looking for a huge log to do a  life-sized carving. He said he had just finished carving a totem pole for the football stadium at McIntosh High [the Chiefs] in Peachtree City, his daughter’s school.  He said he wanted to do another carving of Chief William McIntosh.

“I said, ‘You have got to be kidding. My husband’s family is related to him.’ ”

Nicholas Cole’s grandmother, May McIntosh Cole, was the great grandniece of the Creek Indian chief who died in 1825.

“The Coles were gracious enough to give me a piece of the tree,” Kemp said.  He came back with a trailer and the trunk was raised enough for him to cut off a 12-foot piece.

Charlotte Kemp, now a state-ranked tennis player, will be a senior at McIntosh next year.  Her father said he hopes to have the statue of Chief McIntosh, in full headdress and Scottish kilt, done by Christmas.

The fallen tree is more than half gone but it’s still too heavy to move. One of the latest people to come by for a piece of the incense cedar was internationally known wood turner Matt Moulthrop of Atlanta, whose father and grandfather are also famous for their woodworking.

In truth, the old tree means much more than that to the Coles. On November 19, 2007, family and friends gathered in their yard to celebrate two things–the tree’s listing as a Georgia Champion Tree and the 94th birthday of Nicholas Cole’s mother, Mary Cole.

His mother, Cole said on the lawn that day, “had been taking care of this tree for almost a third of its life.”

Mary Cole died in March 2008.

“I think the one thing we were so grateful for is that she didn’t see it," Pam Cole said. "We were so glad that she didn’t see one of her beloved trees come down.”