The life of the tree, however, probably does not date farther back than the last quarter of the seventeenth century.  In its early history there was nothing to distinguish it from its peers of the greenwood.  When the surrounding forest fell beneath the axe of the woodman, the trees conspicuous for size and beauty escaped the general destruction; among these was the Washington Elm; but there is no evidence that it surpassed its companions.

Tradition states that another large elm once stood on the northwest corner of the Common, under which the Reverend George Whitefield, the Wesleyan evangelist, preached in 1745.  Others claim that it was the Washington Elm under which the sermon was delivered.  The two trees stood near each other, and the hearers were doubtless scattered under each.  But the great elm was destined to look down upon scenes that stirred the blood even more than the vivid eloquence of a Whitefield.  Troublous times had come, and the mutterings of discontent were voicing themselves in more and more articulate phrase.  The old tree must have been privy to a great deal of treasonable talk—­at first, whispered with many misgivings, under the cover of darkness; later, in broad daylight, fearlessly spoken aloud.  The smoke of bonfires, in which blazed the futile proclamations of the King, was wafted through its branches.  It saw the hasty burial, by night, of the Cambridge men who were slain upon the nineteenth of April, 1775; it saw the straggling arrival of the beaten, but not disheartened, survivors of Bunker Hill; it saw the Common—­granted to the town as a training-field—­suddenly transformed to a camp, under General Artemas Ward, commander-in-chief of the Massachusetts troops.

The crowning glory in the life of the great elm was at hand.  On the twenty-first of June, Washington, without allowing himself time to take leave of his family, set out on horseback from Philadelphia, arriving at Cambridge on the second of July.  Sprightly Dorothy Dudley in her Journal describes the exercises of the third, with the florid eloquence of youth.

“To-day, he (Washington) formally took command, under one of the grand old elms on the Common.  It was a magnificent sight.  The majestic figure of the General, mounted upon his horse beneath the wide-spreading branches of the patriarch tree; the multitude thronging the plain around, and the houses filled with interested spectators of the scene, while the air rung with shouts of enthusiastic welcome, as he drew his sword, and thus declared himself Commander-in-chief of the Continental army.”

Dorothy does not specify under which elm Washington stood.  It is safely inferable from her language that our tree was one of several noble elms which at this time were standing upon the Common.

Although no contemporaneous pen seems to have pointed out the exact tree beyond all question, happily the day is not so far distant from us that oral testimony is inadmissible.  Of this there is enough to satisfy the most captious critic.