Tall Trees Grove: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Redwood National Park, National Park Service

McCardle, Kevin; Babalis, Timothy

The Tall Trees Grove Historic District is a discontinuous district of two nearby old growth coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens) groves along Redwood Creek within Redwood National Park. The unit acquired significance after a 1963 National Geographic and National Park Service survey found what were then the world’s tallest, second, third and sixth tallest trees on land owned by a lumber company. The survey and subsequent 1964 article in National Geographic Magazine fostered interest and support from the public, environmentalists, and wilderness enthusiasts for the establishment of a redwood national park. The original 1968 Redwood National Park boundary included the grove, but the later Redwood Expansion Act of 1978 expanded the park to protect the grove from the environmental effects of logging in the region and became an example of a more scientifically informed natural resource management era. The discontinuous district is approximately twenty acres of coast redwood in two separate groves along Redwood Creek. Although a map in the 1964 article drew one boundary around “The Tall Trees,” the trees are in two distinct groves with no contributing features between. The first, third, and sixth tallest trees as identified in the 1963 survey are in the south grove most visited by the public. The second tallest tree is in a grove approximately ¾ of a mile north, or downstream, with no direct access. Because the two groves were historically referred to as one, they will continue to be referred to as “Tall Trees Grove” in this document. The trees are significant because they demonstrated that the trees of Tall Trees Grove are not a few single monumental organisms, but part of the ecology of Redwood Creek basin.

Tall Trees Grove: Cultural Landscape Inventory, Redwood National Park, National Park Service

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