Ulmus serotina Sar. at the top of Myrtle Hill Cemetery, near the Civil War Monument. It is a tree below the Monument at the edge of the hill, facing the Coosa River and the Broad Street, in Rome, Floyd Co., Georgia. September 6, 2003
		October 15, 2003

Scientific name: Ulmus serotina Sargent
Common name: September Elm, Red Elm
Family: Ulmaceae; Elm
Legal status: Criticly imperiled in Georgia
Flowering and Fruiting periods: late September-October; October-November
Habitat: Limestone hills and bottoms, along streams, dry rocky limestone soils

Comments: Charles L. Boynton (1864-1943) a botanist at the Biltmore Herbarium in North Carolina found Georgia's first specimen of Ulmus serotina Sarg., September Elm, in Rome, near the Coosa River in 1898.

Description: "Arborescent. Leaves oblong to oblong-obovate, acuminate, variously oblique at the base, coarsely and doubly crenulate-serrate, membranaceous, a glabrous and lustrous above, puberulous below on the prominent midribs and veins. Flowers perfect, autumnal, racemose, from buds in the axils of leaves of the year, long-pedicellate. Calyx six-parted to the base, its divisions oblong-obovate, rounded at the apex. Ovary sessile, narrowed below, hirsute. Samaras stipitate, oblong-elliptical, deeply two-parted at the apex, ciliate on the margins. Seeds obovate; raphe conspicuous. Young leaves, stipules and bracts unknown. A tree with a trunk forty or fifty feet in height and from two to three feet in diameter covered with close pale gray bark, comparatively small spreading or pendulous branches, slender pendulous branchlets, light reddish-brown, lustrous and marked occasionally with white lenticels, growing darker during their second season, ultimately dark gray-brown and often furnished in their second or third year with two or three thick corky wings. The winter –buds are ovate, acute, a quarter of an inch in length and covered with numerous oblong-obovate dark chestnut-brown scales. The leaves are thin and firm in texture, yellow-green and lustrous on the upper surface, rather paler on the lower surface, from two to three inches in length, with prominent midribs and about twenty pairs of primary veins running to the points of the principal teeth and often forked near the margin of the leaf, obscure reticulate veinlets, and stout petioles a quarter of an inch in length; in the autumn they turn orange-yellow before failing. The flowers are reddish-brown with yellow anthers, and are borne on slender conspicuously jointed pedicles often an eight of an inch long in many-flowered racemes from an inch to an inch and half in length. The fruit, which ripens early in November, is about half an inch long and is fringed on the margins with long silvery-white hairs." –Charles S. Sargent, 1899.

Site: Myrtle Hill Cemetery was established in 1857. It is located at the confluence of the Etowah and Oostanaula Rivers, and it is a burial grounds of the citizens of Rome and of the 375 soldiers who died during the Civil war in 1861-1865. The grave and a memorial of the two Rome’s founders, Daniel R. Mitchell and Zachariah B. Hargrove are at this cemetery. There is also a grave of University of Georgia student Richard Vonalbade Gammon, the sophomore and football player, who died in 1897. He was fatally injured during the Georgia-Virginia game.
The First Lady Ellen Louise Axson Wilson, the first wife of Thomas Woodrow Wilson, the Twenty-Eighth President of the United States of America from 1913-1921, was buried at Myrtle Hill Cemetery in 1914.
At the base of the Myrtle Hill Cemetery, there is a memorial park for the Veterans of: the World War I, the World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Persian Gulf War, and the Iraqi Freedom. It is also the final resting place of Charles Graves, the American's Known Solider from the World War I.
On the right side of the park stands the First Monument to the Women of the Confederacy erected by Floyd County Camp of Sons of Confederate Veterans in 1910. One of the inscriptions on the Monument is by President Thomas Woodrow Wilson, at that time a President of the Princeton University :

"Whose purity, whose fidelity, whose courage, Whose gentle genius in love and in council, Kept the home secure, the family a School of virtue, the State a court of honor; Who made a war a season of heroism, And a peace a time of healing. The guardian of our tranquility and Of our strength."-Thomas Woodrow Wilson, 1910

References :
1. Sargent, Charles S. "New or Little Known North American Trees" Botanical Gazette 2 (1899): 92-94.
2. Lounsbery, Alice., and Ellis Rowan. Southern Wild Flowers and Trees New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company Publishers, 1901: 139.
3. Images by Zvezdana Ukropina-Crawford

Last updated on November 13, 2007.