BY WESLEY YOUNG
SALISBURY POST

Imagine standing under the black walnut that shades the ground where Pickett’s Charge streamed by and sealed the fate of the South at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Or picture yourself cold and freezing at Valley Forge, standing beside one of the river birches along the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania.

You can do all that in Rowan County, thanks to the newly finished ‘‘Famous and Historic Trees Trail’’ at Sloan Park in western Rowan County.

The half-mile paved trail takes you past 75 trees whose parent trees played a part in American history. Most of the Rowan County trees are mere saplings now.

But over time, they’ll rise to shade the walk and stand as silent history lessons to those who bother to learn their stories.

Meanwhile, the nearby ‘‘Monument Forest’’ trail gives park visitors a chance to memorialize their own history. For a donation, you can place a tree along the quarter-mile trail that loops around and over part of the trail with the historic trees.

‘‘People are responding and purchasing the trees,’’ said park supervisor Mark Bonnell.

Prices range from $500 for a pin oak or live oak, to $200 for a silver maple or flowering dogwood. Or, for $7,500 to $9,000, you can donate one of the flowering beds. The cost of the trees and the flower beds includes the cost of ongoing maintenance, Bonner said.

The historic trees even include what’s called the ‘‘Moon Sycamore.’’

Here’s the story: When Stuart Roosa flew to the moon on Apollo 14, he took along some tree seeds to honor the U.S. Forest Service. Roosa didn’t actually make it down to the moon – he orbited the moon in the command module while two other astronauts went down – but he did bring back his seeds. The original Moon Sycamore stands on the campus of the University of Mississippi.

Some of the original trees are no longer standing. For instance, the St. Mary’s Holly stood at St. Mary’s College in southern Maryland for some 230 years, witnessing the birth of the country in 1776 and the college in 1840. But a violent thunderstorm took down the tree in 1990, just six months after someone had taken cuttings. One of those cuttings now grows as a holly tree on the Sloan Park trail.

Some of the historic trees stand at the graves of famous people, and others shade their boyhood and girlhood homes.

Others took a more direct role: The Marquis de Lafayette, wounded in the Battle of Brandywine in 1777, lay against a sycamore tree’s bark while his wounded leg was tended. That tree is now known as the Lafayette Sycamore, and it stands at the battlefield in Chadds Fork, Pa.

The trees at Sloan Park may not witness any battles, but they’ll sure stand around for a lot of weddings. Near the center of the tree-lined walk rises Don’s Gazebo, built to honor the former Salisbury Post advertising manager, the late Don Stiller, and donated to the park by Stiller’s wife, Peggy, his children and friends.

The park will rent the gazebo for $40 per wedding, and the first one is already scheduled for April 10, Bonner said.

The historic trees were donated by the Henry Culp Lumber Co. in New London, and their planting has taken three years. Bonner said the project was hatched 15 years ago by Jim Foltz, parks director, and Ed Listerman, who went to work for Culp.

The Memorial Forest came about over the past year of planning. Lester Brown and Son Nursery and Landscaping did the landscape architecture for the projects.

The formal dedication of the new areas takes place at 3 p.m. Sunday, April 25.