How Connecticut’s ‘First’ Christmas Tree Sparked a National Holiday Tradition

Who could imagine an American Christmas without a Christmas tree? One could argue the tree is as central to the holiday as Santa Claus himself and the tree would not have been "a thing" without the State of Connecticut.

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Connecticut is the Birthplace of the Christmas Tree

According to the New England Historical Society:

A Hessian soldier named Hendrick Roddemore put up a Christmas tree in Windsor Locks, Conn., in 1777, giving Connecticut the claim to the first Christmas tree. The Americans captured Roddemore, a mercenary, at the Battle of Bennington. Many prisoners from that battle were sent to Boston and then elsewhere. Roddemore ended up at the farm of Samuel Denslow in Windsor Locks. Denslow let him live in a small cabin on what is now the Noden-Reed Farm and home of the Windsor Locks Historical Society. In 1777, Roddemore raised a Christmas tree inside that small cabin. He continued to live there until well after the war, putting up a tree every year. Today, a stone marks the spot where Roddemore put up that first tree.

It turns out everyone wants to be first in something, like Vermont. The New England Historical Society says they there the first state to have a National Christmas tree. NEHS writes:

In 1923, a General Electric engineer named Frederick Morris Feiker wrote to President Calvin Coolidge suggesting he light the national Christmas tree on the Ellipse. Coolidge asked the president of Middlebury College to donate a tree from Vermont. Wealthy Middlebury alumni paid to ship the 48-foot-tall balsam fir to Washington, D.C. A crane put the tree in place a few weeks before Christmas, and $5,000 worth of GE electrical cables illuminated the 2,500 red, white and green Christmas lights.

Such a middle-child thing to do. Ooh, Mr. President, you like trees? We have some!

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