San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Hunt is on for historic ‘15-bushel’ pecan tree
National Geographic magazine, September 2016, had this picture of a massive pecan tree in San Antonio. The picture was taken in 1915. Can you find out any more information about the tree – where it was located? Any other history?
The photograph of this magnificent specimen is credited to Paul Popenoe, a jackof-all-trades avocational scientist, who at that time worked with his younger brother Wilson Popenoe.
Both were supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as “agricultural explorers” to observe methods of fruit cultivation in Central and South America, toward the development of new or improved crops in the U.S.
The photo of the giant pecan may have been taken as early as 1913, when the younger Popenoe was in Texas “to study conditions” in preparation for a trip to Brazil, where he would be “determining what plants, shrubs and trees would be suitable for reproduction in this country,” according to the San
Antonio Light, July 7, 1913.
Popenoe, of USDA’s foreign seed and plant introduction bureau, told the Chamber of Commerce that he — no mention of brother Paul, whose government connection was less formal — would be in the area for several days. Once in Brazil, Popenoe would be looking at fruit and fibrous plants with an eye to bringing some back to try here.
National Geographic says the photo was submitted along with 25 other pictures for a contest to find the nation’s largest hardwood tree. Rebecca Dupont, image archivist at the magazine, checked their files and found only the original caption from 1915: “Two men pose at the base of a pecan tree over five feet in diameter and another person on a branch.” The people aren’t named, and the location is given as “San Antonio, Texas, USA.”
This striking photo turns up uncredited in at least two other publications.
It appears in “Greater San Antonio, City of Destiny and Your Destination,” published in 1918 by the Higher Publicity League. On a page headed “Typical San Antonio Trees and Vines,” it’s captioned: “The 15-bushel Richter pecan tree, south of San Antonio.”
The photo also is used to illustrate a story published in the San Antonio Express on Oct. 29, 1929, about the pecan-growing industry, headed “Pecan crop worth millions,” where it’s identified only as “Giant native pecan along Medina River near San Antonio.”
To put the prodigious tree in perspective, one to four bushels was average at the time. Its diameter can be estimated at 60-70 inches, said Gretchen Riley, partnership coordinator at the Texas A&M University Forest Service. The lower end of that range is the usual upper limit for pecan trees.
Using a formula of growth (a moderate rate of 4-4½ inches per year) times diameter, this tree could be 250 to 300 years old — the upper limit of a pecan tree’s life expectancy.
With the three captions on the same photo giving different locations, the tree could have been located “along the banks of any of a dozen South Texas rivers and streams,” said horticulturist Neil Sperry, author of “Neil Sperry’s Lone Star Gardening” and columnist whose weekly gardening tips appear in Saturday’s Express-News.
The giant pecan is not on the A&M Forest Service’s Big Tree Registry, which is for living trees only. That might indicate that it’s no longer with us. Sperry, who lives in a pecan forest, said lightning strikes are the most common cause of big tree loss. Decay is another.
“Branches break all the time, and unless they are pruned cleanly, decay sets in and moves into the trunk, eventually causing trunks to become hollow,” he said. “Then they break and fall in a windstorm. That’s part of the aging pattern of any species of tree, pecans included.”
There’s nothing on file about the National Geographic-featured tree at the Texas Pecan Growers Association in Bryan, a trade group founded in 1921 that publishes Pecan South magazine.
The association’s Executive Director Blair Krebs couldn’t find anything about this tree in their records. She also reached out to a longtime A&M AgriLife Extension pecan representative in the area, who was unfamiliar with it. There are no similar photos of this tree in the UTSA Special Collections library of Texas photos.
There have been some suggestions that the picture of this magnificent specimen — more symmetrical and less gnarly than a lot of big, old pecans — had something to do with the Texas Legislature’s adoption of the pecan as the official state tree of Texas in 1919, but it doesn’t appear in any of the news coverage or almanacs of the time.
As for the photographer of the uncommonly longlived tree, Paul Popenoe was a college dropout who went from botany and horticulture — publishing and presenting on topics such as bananas and figs — to eugenics and marriage counseling.
From 1929, when he received an honorary doctorate from Occidental College, one of the institutions he dropped out of as a young man, he styled himself “Dr. Paul Popenoe.”
As self-appointed director of the American Institute of Family Relations, Popenoe advocated for the United States to “develop a eugenic conscience,” promoting births among affluent, college-educated Anglo-Saxon people he deemed of sound mind and enforcing sterilization on less well-regarded groups.
“It is hard for America to get away from its tradition of equalitarianism, which is biologically unsound,” he said in a column published in the Light, Nov. 13, 1938.
After World War II, when news of Nazi experiments with eugenics brought the discipline into disfavor, he segued into marriage counseling.
His syndicated column, “Your Family and You,” ran in this paper from the
1950s until the mid-1970s.
Occidental College rescinded his honorary doctorate in 2019, in light of his racist and authoritarian views.
Anyone who knows the location and fate of the prize-specimen pecan tree may contact this column.