A First Gift to the Highlands Museum

The Hemlock Slice

Familiar to anyone who ever visited the Highlands Museum—now the Highlands Nature Center—is the large hemlock slice that has been on display since July of 1928.

The July 8, 1929, minutes of the Board of Trustees report that a slice from “a hemlock stump on the property of the Highlands Estates” (now the Country Club) was offered to the museum by Scott Hudson, its president. The July 22, 1928, minutes further explain that “Mr. (W. M.) Cleaveland said the hemlock tree at the golf course would be ready for installation in the coming week.” Mr. Cleaveland, a local builder, was asked to mount and treat the wood for preservation.

“The problem of marking the 439 rings to associate the tree with the history of this region and the nation was discussed. It was decided that the most feasible method would be to mark the rings with very small pin tags bearing numbers to correspond to a label with the tree’s history and political and general history.”

“To arouse popular interest, everybody will be asked to suggest incidents of sufficient importance to be memorialized on the tree. A Board committee of Miss (Albertina) Staub, Mrs. (Mary Chapin) Smith, and Mr. (Thomas) Harbison will choose suitable suggestions.”

The following summer, a report by Museum Director E. E. Reinke noted that the slice “elicited the greatest interest on the part of the casual visitor in terms of its growth and age interpreted through national and local history.”

The slice still resides in the Nature Center today and continues to capture the attention of visitors. As noted by Randolph P. Shaffner in Heart of the Blue Ridge Highlands, North Carolina, the 500-plus-year-old tree “was a sapling of three years when Columbus set sail on his voyage to America in 1492.”

-Bryding Adams, Volunteer Archivist, January 2026