TREE RING DATING OF THE DAVEY TREE BARN, KENT, OHIO AND THE VALUE OF BUILDING LONG TREE-RING RECORDS IN NE OHIO

Tree-ring data are calendar-dated records of past environmental change. Living records from extant old-growth forests in Northeast Ohio typically extend back to the mid 18th century. These records can be extended by sampling beams from historical structures. This fall, the College of Wooster Tree Ring Lab (WTRL) dated the Davey Tree Barn using dendrochronology; the barn is currently disassembled, and its beams were stored by Davey Tree Expert Company in Kent, OH. Fifteen white oak cores were taken from the beams, fourteen of the cores were chosen for dating due to the existence of intact outer rings or enough annual rings to confidently date the sample. Cores were measured to the nearest 0.001 mm and were cross-dated to build a floating chronology. This ring-width series was then matched to living tree-ring records from the region. Seven of the cores had outer rings (cut dates) of CE 1889; four dated to 1888 and two to 1887. Thus, the construction date of the Davey Tree Barn likely took place in the year 1890.

The growth patterns of these white oak core samples from the Davey Tree Barn are consistent with ring-width series from over 100 dated buildings in Ohio and Pennsylvania. They exhibit very tight growth prior to European settlement and then a time transgressive release in growth through the 1800s until recent decades. The 2 to 3-fold increase in growth is sustained for more than a century and is due to a host of land use changes, alterations in nutrient cycling, and changes in climate, principally increasing precipitation. Together the tree-ring data extracted from old barns, houses, and remnant old-growth forests provide a means of precisely-dated wood within historical structures and archaeological sites as well as a record of land use and climate change for the nearly the past 500 years.