The stump  below is one of the widest known historically. People and news claimed it was up to 400 ft. tall, 4000 yrs., and maybe the largest coast redwood ever. For years, I assumed the size volume claim was true. But this summer, I reread a 2016 article about an artist planning to make growth ring prints, using a “cookie” of wood cut from this redwood decades ago. By comparing measurements from the article to a living new discovery Spartan, the legends about  Fieldbrook redwood crumbled like a house of cards (size, age, why it cut down, etc.). It was big, but apparently no larger than some of the 10 largest coast redwoods alive today. The explanation about Cracking the Code for real age and size was on two of my pages.

Some information remains on the page Historical Fieldbrook Stump Redwood. The Spartan New Discovery is a good example to show a bigger living redwood with less taper than the Fieldbrook.

In a nutshell. the Fieldbrook stump redwood was really a fat base redwood with severe trunk taper, like a huge Hershey Kiss. The diameter near chest level was 32.15 feet, and said to be 12.5 feet diameter 70 feet above the ground. For comparison, Spartan is approximately  15 feet diameter 70 feet above the ground with diameters of 12.6 feet at 130 ft. high and 13.2 feet at 150 feet high.

Basically, there is no proof Fieldbrook was any taller than 70 feet and the fast taper implies it wasn’t in the same league as Spartan, Lost Monarch or some other new discoveries not yet published. It was certainly very big near the base, but certainly not the size claimed by embellished accounts proliferating the internet.

In past years, I assumed certain claims about some redwoods and other species, but not anymore. Even the single stem claim about Howland Hill Giant, was realized later to be double stems merged, instead.

Fieldbrook Stump Coast Redwood