Beech
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Beech. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a handsome, well known forest tree. The American beech is found from Texas and Wisconsin to Florida and Nova Scotia . It is closely related to the chestnut. The beech is preeminently a forest tree, growing to a height of 80 or 100 feet. The early settlers along the Ohio had tremendous work to clear off the beech forests. The stumps soon decay and the soil of a beech grove is of the richest. The European beech grows readily to a height of 100 to 120 feet, and is a magnificent park tree, "the war-like beech," Spenser calls it; but it branches too soon to have a trunk equal to that of the American beech. Blue beech is not a beech at all, but a birch, and a relative of the ironwood or hop hornbeam. Beech nuts are of a triangular shape and about the size of peas. They are a favorite food of swine, bears, squirrels, and many wild animals. Daniel Boone and the settlers of Kentucky knew where to find bears and wild turkeys when beech mast was ripe. Buckwheat or "beech wheat," as it should be called, is so named from the resemblance of its kernel to a beech nut. Beech wood makes excellent fuel, ranking with hickory and maple. The timber makes excellent handles for tools. The lumber does not last well in exposed situations, but is enduring under water. It makes excellent material for dams, watermills, sluiceways, etc. As the wood is without odor and is not subject to checking, it is much used for the wooden boats in which grocers sell butter, pickles, and many other articles. See Hickory ; Walnut
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a tree, the fagus sylvatica, or the genus fagus to which it belongs. It is ranked under the order corylaceæ (mast-worts). The nuts are triquetrous, and are placed in pairs within the enlarged prickly involucre. They are called mast, and are devoured in autumn by swine and deer. The wood is brittle and is used by turners, joiners, and millwrights. The fine thin bark is employed for making baskets and band-boxes.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts treat the beech as a permanent fixture of forest and park, and the tree itself is unchanged "80 or 100 feet" of smooth grey bark. What has arrived since is disease: beech bark disease, spread by an introduced scale insect and a Neonectria fungus, has worked south through North American beech stands since it reached Nova Scotia around 1890, and beech leaf disease, caused by a nematode and first noticed in Ohio in 2012, has since spread through the northeastern states and into Ontario. Collier's placed the tree in the order Corylaceae in 1921; botanists now put beech, oak and chestnut together in the Fagaceae. The wooden "boats" in which Aiton's grocers sold butter and pickles are long gone, though beech is still valued for turnery, flooring, furniture and tool handles.
Written for this edition, 2026.