Emily Chan
The dark, quiet, swampy waters of the Black River Preserve in North Carolina are where North America’s oldest trees east of California stand tall.
A cypress tree growing in Bladen County was dated at 2,624-years-old. The property where the tree was found had been purchased by the Nature Conservancy.
The ancient tree was first discovered in the 1980s when David Stahle, a dendrochronologist, professor, and researcher at the University of Arkansas, visited the Black River Preserve along with a retired biologist named Julie Moore.
Even back then, Stahle was sure that the cypress tree was over 1,000-years-old, and decades later, his hunch was confirmed.
Not only has the tree been identified as the oldest cypress tree, but it is also the fifth-oldest tree in the world.
“At the time, I figured [there are] 1,000-year-old trees all around here, which is extraordinarily rare anywhere but California and Chile, too,” Stahle said. “It’s very rare worldwide to find trees that are over 1,000-years-old.”
In 2011, one of Stahle’s graduate students wanted to return to Black River to study the trees. Angie Carl, a guide at the Nature Conservancy, took them downstream toward the cypress trees.
The ages of the trees were measured using dendrochronology, a scientific method of dating trees through their rings.
It is done by twisting a hollow borer into a tree trunk to retrieve a small, pencil-sized sample of the tree’s core. To verify the ages, radiocarbon dating is used as an additional measure.
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