Phillipston's Liberty Elm

The elm tree standing here in Phillipston descends symbolically from one of the most famous trees in American history. On the morning of August fourteenth, seventeen sixty-five, Bostonians woke to find two effigies hanging from an elm on what is now Washington Street, placed there in protest of the despised Stamp Act. That tree became the original Liberty Tree, a gathering place for the Sons of Liberty and an early symbol of American resistance.

When Loyalists cut it down in seventeen seventy-five, it was already a legend. Communities across Massachusetts named their own elms in its honor. This one, called the American Liberty Elm, carries that chain of memory into a quiet central Massachusetts town far from the Boston crowds where the movement began.