From the Introduction


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On a chill December afternoon when the hardwoods stand barren, their fallen leaves but sodden dregs of autumn’s gold, Worcester’s hues are clay and stone. Viewed from Mount St. James, once home to native Nipmucs, now to the College of the Holy Cross, the muted city melds with the dun-colored woodlands of surrounding hills—its red-brick factory buildings and cement offices crowding the valley floor, a glass-and-steel bank tower mirroring winter’s slate sky, white and brown and beige three-deckers climbing rocky hillsides, the charcoal-gray swath of I-290 snaking over streets.

Come spring, though, there is green. First, a fine misting of chartreuse as the weeping willows unfurl their buds, then a wash of emerald as the sugar and Norway maples, the ashes, oaks and ginkgoes spread their leaves, until Worcester’s swarthy face is softened by a sylvan veil. A city of aging factories and dreams of renewal, of ethnic pride and paternalism, of grit, ingenuity and determination, Worcester is also a city of trees.

Like many American cities, Worcester planted the majority of those trees in the mid-19th century, in response to industrialization’s ills. Modest planting efforts by private citizens throughout the colonies had predated the revolution by nearly a century. But as the young nation evolved from an agrarian society dependent on foreign trade to a competitive manufacturing economy linked by rail, remote country towns metamorphosed into sooty, congested cities. Dismayed by the transformation, residents yearned for urban greenery to restore a romanticized vision of rural paradise lost.

It was a transformation that could have been anticipated by any traveler to London, where smog and slums were urban fixtures by the early 1800s. In the name of progress, however, Americans ignored warning signs from abroad. Capitalizing on steam-driven turbines, which ended dependence on hydropower, and railroads, which sliced transportation time and cost, industry proliferated during the first half of the 19th century. Obscuring the pastoral countryside near rail hubs and commercial centers, massive brick manufactories lured legions of farm workers and immigrants in search of a better life. The influx of laborers swelled city censuses exponentially, straining housing and fledgling municipal services. Soon, tenements shadowed factories and sewage choked rivers. Surveying their boomtowns as the nation argued over slavery, civic leaders began to realize the bitter truth their English brethren had learned 50 years earlier—that the price of urban prosperity was pollution, overcrowding and cholera.

Hoping to mitigate health-threatening “miasmas” while re-creating a pastoral ideal, private citizens and local governments set out hundreds of thousands of trees. The results, by the turn of the 20th century, were lush, canopied streets and densely shaded parks. But today, nearly a century later, those urban forests—all the trees within city limits—in Worcester and throughout the United States are dying from neglect.