The King's Arrow Pine

Written by
Alissa
World Champion LumberJill
​Founder & Owner of the Axe Women Loggers of Maine

Do you know what your official state tree is?
Here in Maine, our state tree is the White Pine, or the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus).
It actually appears on our state flag, our state seal and on the Maine quarter. We even designated the White Pine Cone & Tassel as our Maine State Floral Emblem.

The White Pine is the largest conifer found in the northeastern United States, and has stood out through history with such importance, that Maine is commonly referred to as "The Pine Tree State."

Our White Pines can usually be easily identified. They will most likely be the tallest trees of our landscape, growing up to 150 feet in height! Their cones are 4 to 8 inches in length, and slightly curved. And their leaves, which are needles, are green to blue to silver in color and arranged in bundles of 5. 
They are one of the fastest growing evergreens in the north east - growing up to 2 to 3 feet in height per year! And it is common for their trunks to be over 3 feet in diameter! They can easily reach two hundred years old... and, undisturbed, their maximum age may even exceed 450 years! 

The White Pine grows tall and straight... and the wood it produces is light, strong, easy to work with (even by hand) and is more rot resistant than most. 

As the colonists arrived in America, they soon realized that White Pine was ideal for building their homes, furniture, towns, docks, and ships. During the 1600's and 1700's, Britain claimed exclusive rights to the largest White Pines throughout New England after it was discovered that they would make ideal ship's masts. According to the Maine Forest Service and an article titled "White Pine History, Identification and Management":

"The shortage of ship masts in Europe led to England’s Broad Arrow Policy, whereby pines 24 inches or more in diameter within 3 miles of water were blazed with the mark of the broad arrow; such trees to be reserved for use in the Royal Navy. The term King’s Arrow Pine originated from this policy. Most of the accessible virgin pine was cut by 1850."

The "broad arrow" was a mark cut into these trees with 3 blows of a hatchet, forming the shape of an arrow. These trees were meant to be left, untouched and undisturbed until they were large enough to be used for masts... at which time they would be cut down, hauled to a waterway, floated downstream, loaded onto large ships, and brought across the ocean to England to be used exclusively for the Royal British Navy fleet.

As you can imagine - the desirability of these trees caused excessive logging throughout the 1700's and 1800's which took its toll. It is nearly impossible to find pockets of old growth White Pine now. But thankfully, because of their quick growth rate, they are continuing to make a comeback. 

It is even rumored that in very remote, hard to reach locations here in Maine, people have come across extremely large, old growth White Pines, that still bear the "broad arrow" or "king's arrow" scar. Back in the 1960's a logger from Northern Maine actually came across one of these trees while working in the woods. Unfortunately, the tree was dying... so in order to preserve the important history this tree could tell, the logger cut it down and donated it to his local logging museum, The Ashland Logging Museum in Ashland, Maine. It is still on display there today! 

It's pretty cool to think that as recently as the 1960's some of these trees were still standing! I'd like to think that it wasn't the last one. Definitely something worth going in search of!
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I hope you enjoyed a little bit of our state tree history! Thanks for reading our blog!!

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