A record right over

Bert’s nose

If Bert Vincent could sit up in his grave, he’d see one heck of a story.

Bert — the News Sentinel’s beloved “Strolling” columnist who died in 1969 — is buried alongside his wife, Ellen Hynds Vincent, in Dandridge’s Hopewell Cemetery.

Just to the east of their graves is the story: a magnificent sugar maple 69 feet tall, with a crown that spreads 77 feet to its widest tip. The trunk of this behemoth measures 56.2 inches in diameter and 14.7 feet in circumference.

But hold on a minute. I’m getting ahead of myself.

I’d come to Dandridge with Jim Cortese, a Knoxville tree specialist, to check on a potential candidate for Tennessee’s record-tree list.

It’s a giant white oak growing in a thicket, roughly 300 yards west of the cemetery. A friend had pointed it out to me, and I contacted Jim, who keeps tabs on these things.

Soon as we walked to the site, Jim whistled and remarked, “That’s a humdinger!”

He set about the task of measuring. Here’s his tally: trunk 16.37 feet in circumference, 62.5 inches in diameter; height 102 feet; crown spread 108 feet.

Without elaborate testing, the exact age of this tree can’t be determined. But Jim is certain it dates to the Revolutionary War era.

Think about that. Smack in the middle of Jefferson County is a link to history — a tree that was fully mature long before Union and Confederate forces met in combat, long before the birth of aviation. And it’s alive and prospering.

We left the thicket and were nearly back to Jim’s car when I said, “Let me show you Bert Vincent’s grave.”

We stepped across the ditch and were standing at the Vincent headstone when Jim whistled again. And reached for his tree-measuring tools again.

He marched over to the aforementioned sugar maple and recorded its statistics.

“That’s a mighty big sugar maple,” he said, estimating it as Civil War era. “I’ll see how it stacks up against the record holders, too.”

Back home, Jim consulted the Tennessee Division of Forestry’s official list. Lo and behold, he did have a new entry.

Just not the one he had come to see.

Turns out that the white oak, monstrous as it may be, is smaller than one growing in Union County.

But the sugar maple near Bert’s and Miss Ellen’s graves blew the existing record (from Sullivan County) off the charts. As we speak, Jim is in the process of notifying forestry officials of this new champ.

It’s interesting enough that a record sugar maple casts a shadow across the grave of one of East Tennessee’s journalism icons. As Jim noted with a chuckle, “Bert’s been fertilizing that tree for quite awhile.”

But get this: While browsing through Bert’s file at the News Sentinel, I came across a story from Sept. 29, 1969. Written by the late Willard Yarbrough, it described Bert’s funeral.

“The maple’s green was turning crimson,” Willard reported. “Soon the red and golden leaves would fall and swirl atop his grave.”

And 38 years later generate another story.