Laurel Hill Cemetery’s legendary ‘witness tree’ is felled

May 29, 2016 by Edward Collimore, for The Inquirer

Ulysses S. Grant, Benjamin Harrison, and Rutherford B. Hayes - all Civil War generals and U.S. presidents - once sheltered beneath its branches at Laurel Hill Cemetery in the city’s East Falls section. Legendary Union Gens. Philip Sheridan, William Tecumseh Sherman, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and Dan Sickles were there, too, on the same gentle slope overlooking the Schuylkill…