Davidson College
Davidson College is a private liberal arts college in Davidson, North Carolina. It was established in 1837 by the Concord Presbytery and named after Revolutionary War general William Lee Davidson, who was killed at the nearby Battle of Cowan†...
's 600-acre campus in
Davidson, North Carolina
Davidson is a suburban town located in northern Mecklenburg and Iredell counties, North Carolina, United States, on the banks of Lake Norman. It is a suburb in the Charlotte metropolitan area. The population was 10,944 at the 2010 census, and in ...
. The campus was designated a national arboretum in 1986, but the origins of the arboretum stretch to 1855, when “a few ladies of Davidson College” proposed landscape remodeling to the board of trustees. Students organized tree plantings in 1861; then in 1869, the faculty sent a proposal to the Board of Trustees recommending that the campus "represent in time the forest growth of the State, and if possible, the general botany of the region."
Over the next century, grounds supervisors and landscape architects populated the college's campus with exotic and indigenous flora of
North Carolina
North Carolina () is a state in the Southeastern region of the United States. The state is the 28th largest and 9th-most populous of the United States. It is bordered by Virginia to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the east, Georgia and So ...
region.
In 1982, President Emeritus Samuel R. Spencer Jr. received a letter from the director of the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C., Henry Cathey, urging him to use the grounds as a working arboretum. The letter was accompanied by a check from the estate of Edwin Latimer Douglass, one of whose life interests had been forestry.
The college applied funding from the Douglass estate to take aerial photos and draw up topographical maps. In 1986, the college became a full-fledged arboretum. Since then, students and college staff have contributed to the continuing project of labeling and caring for the trees on campus. Some 3,000 woody trees and shrubs have been labeled. The arboretum is open to the public.