On Downey Street running south past the Birthplace Cottage and Friends Meetinghouse and beyond the boundary line created by the driveway leading to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum are overlooked sites that are part of the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site. The green house is known as the PT Smith House. Hoover played with the Smith children as a child, and the house is the only one he could remember on his trips home years later.

Before reaching the PT Smith House, you will see a marker in front of a large empty lot. This was the location of the second childhood home of Herbert Hoover, the House of the Maples. With a growing family, Jesse purchased this home at an auction for $140 in 1879. Though the house no longer stands, there is something that remains that was present to young Herbert Hoover playing in the yard. The rangers of the Historic Site refer to it as the Hoover Witness Tree.

Toward the center of the lot is a large sugar maple with missing branches. Hoover Park Gardener Ryan Elliott estimates the tree to be 150+ years old and of the age that would have been in existence when Hoover was a boy in West Branch. According to Ryan, as maples age, they will lose branches and the base gets wider. The size of the species is how you tell the age of the tree.

Park Guide Peter, who regularly gives tours of the Historic Site, said of the tree, “It’s definitely a very old maple tree. It’s the House of the Maples, so we know there were maple trees in the yard. Ryan, our gardener and tree guy, feels it’s old enough. There are no other trees in the park that are candidates to be a witness tree. There’s nothing else that old.”

In the United States, the effort to designate historically significant trees began in 2006. The process started after it was discovered that some of the Yoshino cherry trees gifted by Japan in 1910 and ordered to be destroyed after the discovery of bugs and disease survived. The cherry trees people admire in Washington, DC in the spring were mostly from a replacement gift sent in 1912, but there are some, discovered by DNA testing, that are alive and well. Today, there are 24 Witness Trees catalogued across the country.

In order to track these, the Historic American Landscapes Survey (HALS), created by the National Park Service, started the Witness Tree Protection Program. Thanks to this effort, you can visit Witness Trees all around Washington, DC, battlefields, and historic homes. As of today, the Hoover Witness Tree doesn’t have an official designation, though the possibility does exist. Trees are often determined through historic photos, maps, and boring a small core sample in the tree to determine age.

The idea of recognizing Witness Trees is global. Ryan G. Van Cleave, author of The Witness Trees, notes that in his book, giving examples of such trees around the world and outlining the wondrous histories they carry with them from days past. As Van Cleave stated in his correspondence on the Hoover Witness Tree, “Witness trees are the keepers of our collective memory, their roots intertwined with the very fabric of history. They inspire awe, wonder, and a deep appreciation for the interconnectedness of nature and humanity.”

If you come to the Herbert Hoover Historic Site and take the tour, ask to be shown the Hoover Witness Tree. Take the time to reflect on what the tree witnessed years ago. As Ranger Chelsea said, “I like to think that this tree witnessed the innocence of childhood at the Hoover household; children playing in the shade of this maple tree during Iowa’s warm summers and watching again as they raced down snowy Cook’s Hill, sledding ‘down at terrific pace with our tummies tight to home-made sleds,’ as Hoover liked to say.”

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