The pruned Osage orange hedgerow sprouting in spring 2021 at Worthington Farm. NPS photo.
| Specimen | |
|---|---|
| Where | Worthington Farm, Monocacy National Battlefield, Frederick, Maryland |
| Species | Osage orange (Maclura pomifera) |
| Use | hedgerow — a living fence |
| Planted | an estimated 1850–1890 |
| Condition | fair to good |
| Size | none recorded — recently cut back to the root flare |
Looking northwest toward the Worthington House; the freshly coppiced hedge is to the left of the house. NPS photo.
The farm and the battle
Griffin Taylor built the house now called the Worthington House around 1851, on 300 acres of farmland first known as Clifton Farm. After Taylor died in 1855, John F. Wheatley and T. Alfred Ball bought it and the neighbouring Thomas Farm. Ball lived in the house with eight enslaved people, aged 13 to 30, recorded in the 1860 Frederick County slave schedule.
John T. Worthington bought the farm in 1862 and renamed it Riverside Farm. His family was living there during the Battle of Monocacy: on July 9, 1864, Confederate troops crossed the Monocacy River onto the farm and attacked the Union lines from its fields. Afterwards the farm served as a field hospital.
The hedgerow
No one knows exactly when, but Worthington probably planted the Osage orange hedgerow south of the house as a living fence around the kitchen garden and orchard; more hedgerows lined a sunken road north of the house. He grew winter wheat, Indian corn and hay, made butter, and kept cows, horses, pigs and oxen — and the rectangle of Osage orange kept livestock out of the garden and orchard.
Worthington Farm from the air in 1952; the arrow marks the hedgerow south of the house. NPS.
In 2020 the trees had scaffold limbs about four feet up their trunks, suggesting the hedge was once kept at that height, as early photographs also show. By the time the Worthingtons sold the farm to Jenkins Brothers, Inc., in 1953, it had grown taller.
The people who worked beside it
The taller hedge gave shade and shelter from the wind to migrant workers who lived on the farm each season — the bottle middens along its edge are their trace. Black labourers worked the fields around Worthington Farm from the mid-19th century into the 1960s: first enslaved people and tenant labourers, later migrant workers who came each year from the Belle Glade area of Florida, staying in Frederick from spring to autumn, tending soybeans and, in the autumn, working in canneries.
Galen Hahn, a minister to migrant workers in the 1960s, later described their living conditions: an old farmhouse with a row of barracks-like rooms and a converted cow barn, with no running water — and an industry that treated them as tools for profit rather than as people looking for work. That recent history shows exploitative farm labour continuing at Worthington Farm long after the Civil War. NPS staff are researching the migrant workers' lives there.
The hedgerow south of the house in October 2020, before coppicing. NPS photo.
About the tree
Osage orange is native to the Midwest and was first brought to the East Coast in 1803. By the mid-19th century commercial growers were selling it for hedging, and it was on sale in Maryland by 1848. Owners planted living fences because they looked good, held in livestock and broke the wind. The tree can reach 40 feet, though this hedge was kept at four in the 19th century. It fell out of favour late in the century because it hosts the San Jose scale, an insect that damages orchard fruit such as apples and pears.
Cutting it back
In late 2020, a landscape rehabilitation project at the farm removed a non-historic stand of trees to reopen the views between the Worthington and Thomas farms that mattered in the battle. The Osage oranges had reached their full height of about 40 feet, with a canopy about 20 feet wide, and blocked that view.
The hedgerow in January 2021, just after coppicing, with the Thomas Farm visible again to the southeast. NPS photo.
The park coppiced the hedgerow to just above the root flare — where the trunk meets the roots — and will let the shoots grow back each year to between four and six feet, close to the hedge's historic height.
Coppicing relies on many trees' ability to regrow from the stump or roots: a tree is cut to a set height and regenerates from the shoots it sends up. It is used to harvest wood, and — as here — to control the size of woody plants.
Spring growth from the coppiced hedgerow. NPS photo.
Site plan of Worthington Farm, existing conditions in 2013; compare the 1952 aerial photograph to see how the vegetation has changed. The arrow marks the area just south of the house. NPS National Capital Region Cultural Landscapes Program.
Sources
- National Park Service, "Osage Orange at the Worthington Farm, Monocacy National Battlefield." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/mono-osage-orange-plant-story.htm
- Its sources: Michael Commisso, Worthington Farm (Clifton): Cultural Landscape Inventory (NPS, 2013); Michael Commisso and Martha Temkin, Cultural Landscape Report, Thomas and Worthington Farms (NPS, 2013); Galen Hahn, Finding My Field (2018); and Charlie Pepper's 2021 trip report on treatment options for the Osage orange.
- A 1929 photograph of the hedgerow, credited to Baltimore Sun Historic Photos/TCA, is not reproduced.
- Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
In these publicationsMonocacy National Battlefield
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.nps.gov
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