Lou’s View

By Lou Bernard

If you’re a dad, you know how it goes. When your kid is playing with one of his friends, you gotta chat with other dads. Generally, all dads involved would prefer to be home watching TV or something, but family life doesn’t always work out that way.

Usually, you stand there awkwardly with the other dad and talk about the weather or something. (“Hot one.” “Yeah.” “Gonna rain, though.” “Yeah.”) But every now and again, you get a prize of a conversation. A while ago, I stumbled onto one of those while my son was playing with one of his little friends.

The other dad works for some sort of outdoor organization—Look, you can only get to know the other dad just so much without beer, and it was ten-thirty in the morning—And he asked me about a property in town. 212 West Bald Eagle Street, to be exact. He brought it up because there is a Camperdown Elm tree there.

The Camperdown Elm is a very uncommon tree (“Ultra-rare” was how he put it) that takes some special care to grow. In spite of the fact that I grew up on a Christmas tree farm, I don’t pretend to be an expert in trees, but I was interested because it’s one of those wild facts about Lock Haven, which definitely is my specialty. The one at 212 West Bald Eagle is the only Camperdown Elm in Lock Haven. We have a few gingkoes, which by the way is the only type of existing tree that was alive during the time of the dinosaurs, but only one of those elms. There’s another one in the Swissdale Cemetery, and to the best of my knowledge, those are the only Camperdown Elms in Clinton County.

I’m informed that Camperdown Elms can only be grown from the stump of another tree. This is kind of a fascinating concept to me, and when you look at Lock Haven’s one and only Camperdown Elm, you can see it. There is a seam around the middle of the trunk, about four feet up, that clearly shows where the elm came up from a previous stump. The diameter of the trunk tapers considerably above this seam, which suggests that the elm is much younger than the previous tree, which makes sense. (I always hated math in school, and I never thought I’d have any use for terms like “diameter,” but here we are.)

So who planted this thing? Who took this care to nurture a very rare tree in their side yard? Probably a local Jewish family.

I have to estimate the probable age of the tree here. Camperdowns grow fairly fast, but live to be about a century and a half. Based on that estimate, I can work my way back through the old city directories. In the early 1900s, that whole neighborhood was the Jewish section of town. The synagogue was on the corner of Commerce and Clinton Streets. (It’s still there, but it’s apartments now.) So they all clustered around it, to make it easier to walk to church.

The Claster family lived in the house with the elm. Lewis Claster, a local grocer, lived there with his wife Edith and son Benjamin. All of them, today, are buried in Beth Yehuda Cemetery. Based on the probable age of the elm, it’s a safe bet that the Clasters were the ones who brought this rare tree to Lock Haven and grew it there. Which I have to admit is pretty cool; all these years I never knew there was this rare tree in the city until recently.

I wonder what else I could learn by talking to the other dads? It could be beneficial. Maybe we all need to go out for a beer sometime.