The more than century-old copper beech was thick as a midsized sedan.

A crew of skilled tree hackers took her down in less than a day, leaving a stump face as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

“It’s truly a beautiful tree,” Johnston Historical Society Trustee Anthony J. Ursillo said, watching the saws tear into one of the town’s oldest surviving Putnam Pike sentinels.

A week earlier, Ursillo wrote to inform the SunRise that the stately Ent would be removed.

“We have a very large 100-year-old tree (on the front lawn at the JHS) which unfortunately needs to be taken down,” he sadly reported. “It has rotted away.”

Louis McGowan, the Historical Society’s Manager of Archives and Museum (and former president), provided a nearly century-old photo of the tree.

“This is from 1928 and shows our tree just behind the one in the foreground,” McGowan said last week. “Blanche Farmum, the last owner-occupant of the house, said she had the tree planted when she was married. That event took place between 1911 and 1919.”

In just the past four years, University of Rhode Island researchers have reported a new blight facing trees like the historical society’s former tenant — “a new disease of beech trees throughout Rhode Island — beech leaf disease (BLD).”

“It’s caused by a foliar nematode and can kill American and European beech trees,” according to URI. “The disease was first seen in Ohio in 2012 and quickly spread east. It was found in RI in 2020 in Ashaway. In 2020 it appeared to be confined to a 5-mile diameter area in Ashaway. In 2021 it was found in many locations in Washington County, Newport County, and in some locations in Kent County. This year BLD symptoms are severe throughout Washington County and infected trees have been found in Providence County.”

It’s uncertain if BLD killed the historical society’s copper beech tree. No matter the cause of death, the massive copper beech will be missed outside the historic Elijah Angell House and the Johnston Historical Society barn museum next door.