About 40 years ago, the former Campbell Garden Club member found herself, for the first time in her life, standing in the middle of a garbage landfill. In the dusty, alien setting in San Jose, she set about with the help of three dump workers looking for the root crown of what days before was a redwood tree towering 70 feet in the air.

"Of course, anybody interested in any kind of historic preservation would understand why I was so determined to find that stump," Brannon, now 82 years old, says. "But even the workers were enthusiastic in helping me find it. Teddy Roosevelt was admired by everyone."

Sixty-one years previously, in 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt planted that very same tree, affording it what Brannon thought was a position in Campbell history significant enough to preserve.

But that wasn't how the Campbell City Council saw it 61 years later.

On September 28, 1964, the city council voted unanimously to cut the tree down as part of its resolve to widen Winchester Boulevard. The council made its decision late Monday night, and the tree was felled by 9 a.m. the next day.

Columnist George Vierhus for the Campbell Press, the local community newspaper, decried in a front-page column that the action was taken so quickly that the newspaper didn't even have a chance to take a photo of the moment it was cut. This, the columnist said, left incomplete the visual record of the tree's life in Campbell. The most the publication could do was to run a cover photo of the trunk already lying ignominiously on the ground with workers taking a chainsaw to it.

"The end of an era," the photo caption said simply.

But it was far from the end of the tree.

On the contrary. It was just the beginning of life for what were to become three Roosevelt Trees scattered throughout the South Bay.

The original tree was planted in 1903 by then-President Roosevelt.

The only sitting president to have ever visited the Orchard City, Roosevelt came to Campbell at the request of J. Fred Smith, the principal of the newly created Campbell High School District.

At the time, Campbell High School was in the upper floor of Campbell Grammar School. Today the grammar school has become the Campbell Heritage Village Offices on the northeast corner of Campbell Avenue and Winchester Boulevard.

In 1903 Smith wanted to build a separate facility for high school students, so he proposed to have one constructed on the southeast corner, where Blue Sky Restaurant now sits.

But he had to convince skeptical district residents that a separate high school was even necessary. He came up with the idea to invite none other than President Roosevelt—an early environmentalist—to Campbell and ask him to plant a tree on the proposed site. The community's pride and the growing tree, Smith hoped, would lead to a growing desire within the community to have the school built.

With much fanfare and celebration, Roosevelt did indeed come. On May 11, 1903, he planted a redwood tree. Soon afterward, just as Smith had hoped, the community supported his plan and backed the new Campbell Union High School campus.

"It's quite an interesting story," says Jeannette Watson, Campbell historian and city councilwoman. "We had the president of the United States in our town, which was a very significant event. And the visit did its job—we got a beautiful tree and we got a new school."

But the school population rapidly outgrew the campus. So in 1937, construction began on a "new" Campbell Union High School, located where the Campbell Community Center now stands. The school was completed in 1938.

Although the students and teachers enjoyed the benefits of having a brand new home, the Roosevelt Tree stayed where it was, standing against the relentless tide of development for three more decades.

But by the 1950s, a service station was built on the site of the old high school. And the ground all around the Roosevelt Tree was paved over, leaving the tree with far less irrigation than was needed. Many people began to wonder about the survivability of the tree in such conditions.

"I remember it being very dirty," says Bob Culp, Campbell Union High School principal from 1956 to 1968. "And it wasn't healthy, because it just wasn't getting any water."

The Campbell Press at the time described the tree as being "decayed."

But according to Jeannette Watson, in her book Campbell: the Orchard City, a 1963 study by the nationally renowned forestry and agriculture expert Woodbridge Metcalf concluded that the tree was still in "fair condition" and would continue to grow if holes were simply drilled into the blacktop to water the tree occasionally.

Nonetheless, a year later, talk began to circulate that the historic tree would have to be cut. The city was considering widening Winchester Boulevard and said the tree would simply be in the way.

The debate about whether or not to cut down the tree went on for about nine months, Brannon says, during which time it was clear that most of the public was in favor of preserving the tree.

"All the schools were for keeping it," she says. "If there was ever a case of the will of the people prevailing, this should have been it."

But, she says, the city council went ahead with its plans for widening Winchester Boulevard, anyway, and it cut down the tree.

Though the deed was done Tuesday morning, Brannon didn't find out about it until Thursday afternoon, whereupon she immediately found out which company hauled the stump away and where it had taken it. Finding the stump, or root crown, was of the utmost importance because there was still a chance "to save the tree," she says.

"The scientific name for the tree is Sequoia sempervirens," Brannon says, "which literally means 'Sequoia ever living.'"

With lifespans known to extend more than 2,000 years, they are among the oldest living organisms on the planet. One of the characteristic traits of the species is that the tree is able to reproduce with seedlings, with burls and with the root crown, she says.

Burls are the lumpy outcroppings on the trunk of the tree, and the root crown is the stump.

Reproduction by means of seedlings produces a whole new tree. Reproduction by means of burls and root crowns produce clones of the original tree.

When a redwood tree is cut down, she says, little sprouts emerge from the root crown and begin to grow as if they're individual trees.

As they grow they rub up against one another, and because they have the very same genes as the original organism, they begin to fuse together into one trunk. Eventually, she says, the central trunk will whither away, leaving a hollow tree.

But that could only happen if she was able to find the stump.

Brannon and the workers found the root crown late Friday afternoon under thousands of cubic feet of refuse. And in a whirlwind of activity, she arranged to get it out of there.

It was about 4 p.m., she says, which was just before everyone she needed to contact would retire for the weekend.

She was lucky.

She got hold of Bob Amyx, Santa Clara County Department of Parks and Recreation's director. She asked if he knew of a place to give the stump a new home.

Amyx was quick to offer Vasona Park, she recalls.

Then she arranged for a small replanting ceremony for the following Monday. She got hold of Culp to lend her the original shovel that Roosevelt used, which they would use to plant the new tree. At the time, the shovel was kept at Campbell Union High School.

She did this all within a few hours, from a pay phone at the dump.

All her efforts bore fruit.

On Oct. 5, 1964, the Garden Club hosted the replanting ceremony. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts sang the "Star Spangled Banner" and "America the Beautiful." People read the same speech Roosevelt gave when he planted the original tree 61 years previously, and they used Roosevelt's shovel.

But planting the tree was only the first step in ensuring the tree was saved, Brannon says. She visited the site almost every day for a few weeks afterward, making sure it was well fed and watered. Eventually, the stump took root, and as expected, multiple sprouts burst forth from the crown. For a few years, she visited the tree, which is located between the Youth Science Institute and the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation offices at Vasona Park. She often gave talks to visiting youth about its history.

One day, she brought her friend Michael Antonacci, who was the director of city planning with the city of San Jose. She expected to show him the multiple shoots coming out of the root crown, but to their surprise and dismay, when they happened upon it, there was only one stem reaching skyward.

Amyx, who saw his friend Antonacci at the tree, came out from inside his offices to greet him. After the pair asked Amyx what happened to the many sprouts, Brannon says Amyx replied: "If I hadn't personally seen to it that all those suckers were cut off, then this one sapling wouldn't have been as healthy."

"It was the most stunning thing," she says of his ignorance. "God, I couldn't believe it! But I have that phrase branded in my brain now."

Because of Amyx's actions, she says, the tree trunk isn't nearly as thick or dramatic as she would have hoped. Today, it certainly isn't as wide as its younger brother clone in Campbell.

On May 11, 1966, Campbell Union High School Superintendent Larry Hill, who had taken a burl off the original tree a few years before the original tree was removed, planted his burl where it now stands at the southeast corner of the Campbell Community Center.

"That man had a real sense of history," Watson says. "He was a brilliant man who recognized the historical significance and interest of the tree."

Well watered and taken care of, the tree has become a prime example of how a Sequoia sempervirens should appear, Brannon says.

Campbell celebrates the tree's heritage every Christmas season, as it officially lights up the tree for the holidays. The community center tree is estimated to be 65 feet tall, and each year, the Campbell Community Center manager Linda Klemczak says, they need a larger cherry-picker truck to string the lights on the tree.

But Saratoga has a Roosevelt Tree as well, Brannon says. She gave Antonacci a burl from the remains of the original Roosevelt Tree. He planted it on one of his properties in the Saratoga hills, where, like the other two redwoods, it now prospers because a few people believed in keeping a hallmark moment in history firmly rooted in time.