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The American elms that thrive on one long, historic block of Valley View Drive live in a special place of east Medford and in the hearts of their benefactors. The 22 elms that form an arboreal archway date back more than a century when Valley View Drive was a thin lane to Medford’s reservoir on Capitol Avenue. It later became a trolley thoroughfare and what amounted to a driveway to a magnificent home where Eleanor Roosevelt once lunched. Those trees are magnificent enough to have played a role in Erin Bender moving her family one block to be part of them. “They have a beautiful canopy and provide a lot of livability and beauty to a unique part of Medford you don’t see too often,” Bender says. “They’re special to us and to Medford.” The elms also are special enough to garner this year’s Heritage Tree Award from the city of Medford, a citation created to call attention to slivers of the urban forest that have grown up around this town. Once America’s most trusted street-liner, American elms in recent decades have fallen prey to disease, so groups such as this one are rare. “As a street, it’s unique aesthetically and environmentally,” says Adam Airoldi, supervisor of Medford’s tree program. Dutch elm disease, a fungal disease transmitted by elm bark beetles, has ravaged American elms throughout the 20th century, causing massive die-offs in cities throughout states in the South and East, where they are most common. While American elms succumbed to Dutch elm disease by the hundreds of thousands, this relatively isolated stand of elms sidestepped the disease. “At this point, it’s rare to see that many big, mature elms and see that much of a mature canopy,” Airoldi said. The city has given out this award seven straight years, with winners ranging from individual trees to stands like another group of elms on private land near the northeast corner of East McAndrews Road and Crater Lake Avenue, Airoldi said. Those are remnants of elms that stretched on East McAndrews Road all the way to Bear Creek. “The award is an effort to tell the story of trees that, in essence, have a story to tell of our community,” Airoldi said. The American elm has a long presence in American history, according to the Arbor Day Foundation, which has a list of cultivators ranging from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Daniel Boone and Henry David Thoreau. The trees also were used to make everything from wagon wheels to folk remedies to barrels and crates, according to the foundation. The Valley View elms first lined the roadway shortly after the start of the 20th century on the road to the reservoir. Long-time Valley View Drive resident Michael Mead recalls talking to a woman who remembered riding her bike past the trees around 1910 “when the trees were new,” he says. The Southern Oregon Traction Co. in 1914 built a trolley from the downtown business district up East Main Street to Eastwood Avenue to access a new development there, the Mail Tribune reported at the time. A year later, the company added two spurs, including one up Valley View Drive, so residents could ride from downtown to the top of the hill for a nickel, the newspaper reported. In 1929, Hamilton and Edith Patton build a massive Tudor-style house at the top, and Eleanor Roosevelt traveled beneath the elms when she ascended Valley View Drive for lunch at that house, which is currently for sale for $1.15 million. Other houses filled in between the early 1930s and 1950, according to documents for the house’s 1993 addition to the National Register of Historic Places. “These trees have kind of stood by as our world and our community evolved around them,” Airoldi says. Reach Mail Tribune reporter Mark Freeman at 541-776-4470 or [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/MTwriterFreeman.