A bug-invested tree trunk will be removed from the grounds of the Irving School, officials said.
What is left of the tree has a connection to Derby history, as it was part of the old “Greystone” property where the Irving School now sits on Garden Place across from the Derby Public Library.
The Greystone property was owned by prominent Valley businessman Edward Shelton, for whom the City of Shelton is named. He was the president of the Ousatonic Water Power Company, organized in 1866, which owned the dam on the Housatonic River between Shelton and Derby.
The property was in Shelton’s family until 1941, when it was purchased by Frances Osborne Kellogg, who attempted to preserve the house on the property.
However, the City of Derby purchased the property after World War II and demolished the house to build the Irving School.
In 2012, school officials brought in a contractor to cut down the tree, which school officials and the city’s tree warden said had to be done because it posed a threat to students and anyone walking by on the sidewalk over which its branches hung.
At the time Alderman Ron Sill said members of the public were upset about the tree’s removal. In addition to its connection to the Greystone property, many past Irving students had carved their initials into the tree. Finally, the Aldermen knew nothing about the school district’s plans to trim and remove the tree until after the work started.
Sill said it was a 100-year-old tree dedicated to the businessmen of Derby.
School officials then decided to leave an eight-foot tall section of the trunk behind. It looks terribly odd.
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But the trunk has been rotting away in the ensuing two years, and members of the Board of Aldermen acknowledged at their Nov. 20 meeting that the tree’s corpse has to go.
This time around Superintendent Matthew Conway requested the tree be removed, and appeared at an Aldermen’s subcommittee to make his case.
An Aldermen’s subcommittee then recommended to the full Board of Aldermen that the tree be removed.
“It’s dead and infested with creatures and bugs,” said Barbara DeGennaro, president of the Board of Aldermen.