On April 1, a community email landed in dozens of inboxes with a subject line that pulled no punches: “Albion Tree Apocalypse Now!” It described streets lined with red Xs, Victory Park looking like “a war zone and logging camp,” and Erie Street sycamore and oak trees facing removal. It called on college faculty, students, and administrators to speak up.
Within days, the response was visible — residents packed city council chambers on April 6, and on April 8, Albion College Whitehouse Nature Center Director Misty Brooks opened the center for a community discussion. The gathering brought together residents, college faculty, city officials, and a certified arborist in a circle of chairs beneath hanging vines and nature murals. Something was shifting.
The discussion that followed was less a formal meeting than a working session. Public Services Director Jason Kern was there, alongside City Manager Dr. Sheryl Theriot, who was three and a half weeks into her new role. Also present were retired professors, a beekeeper, a certified arborist, college faculty, and longtime residents.
Kern acknowledged that until recently the city lacked a coordinated approach. ‘We need to develop a game plan,’ he said — and by the end of the evening, the outlines of one were taking shape. Participants agreed that replacement trees should be medium height at maturity and hardy to road salt and urban conditions. Native species are preferred, though experts acknowledged that some hybrid varieties outperform strictly native trees in street settings. Diversity of species is also a priority — planting too heavily in any one variety leaves the entire canopy vulnerable if disease strikes.
Another unexpected resource surfaced the morning of the meeting. Thomas Wilch, faculty director of Albion College’s Center for Sustainability, reached out to Dan Skean, a retired botany professor who spent more than 30 years at Albion College and now lives in Florida. Skean had supervised a student project roughly a decade ago in which biology and GIS student Luke Martin mapped 3,340 trees in Albion’s parkways, recording species, diameter, health condition, and GPS coordinates for each.
The data had been shared with the city but was lost in the shuffle of staff turnover. Skean found a copy on his personal computer and sent it to Wilch that morning. “This is huge, not having to start the inventory from scratch,” Kern said when he received it.
The spreadsheet documents 78 species across Albion’s parkways. Sugar maple and Norway maple together account for nearly 1,400 of the 3,340 trees — more than 40 percent of the entire canopy concentrated in just two species.
Experts at the meeting noted that this level of concentration carries risk: a single disease or pest targeting maples could devastate Albion’s streetscape in one season. Meanwhile, the trees residents most wanted to protect — oaks and sycamores — numbered just 55 in the decade-old count, less than two percent of the total.
The inventory is ten years old, and conditions have changed, but it gives the city a starting point it did not have before. Wilch noted that Skean had raised concerns about transparency in how tree-cutting decisions are made — including that any process for selling valuable timber from removed trees should keep the decision-maker and the buyer separate. Some of those trees, he said, are worth money.
April 14 marks the close of the annual window for tree removal under Calhoun County bat species restrictions, which limit cutting to the period between October 1 and April 14 each year to protect endangered bat populations. As of Tuesday, April 14, the row of large trees marked with red Xs on Erie Street remained standing.
The office of City Manager Dr. Sheryl Theriot is actively pursuing a DNR grant that could help cover costs for both necessary tree removal and new plantings. Residents who expressed interest in Albion’s tree program have been asked to submit letters of support for the application by April 28.
Theriot also mentioned a lead on trees being thinned in Detroit that Kern could potentially collect — a low-cost way to add to Albion’s replanting stock.
The urgency felt new, but the roots ran deep. Wesley Dick, who introduced himself at the April 8 gathering as an agitator, was present in Albion more than 50 years ago when CBS News reporter Hughes Rudd filed a story for the evening news broadcast anchored by Walter Cronkite. Rudd described Albion as a manufacturing city of 14,000.
Today, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates Albion’s population at 7,494. Albion College, whose students cleaned the Kalamazoo River on that first Earth Day, enrolled 1,308 students in fall 2024. Both the city and the college are smaller than they were in 1970 — and both were represented in the circle of chairs at the Whitehouse Nature Center on April 8.
On April 11, members of the Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority — including five who traveled from out of town — and 19 Albion College students joined city workers to plant ten native trees at Victory Park in celebration of Arbor Day. Certified arborist Bob Wright of Gee Farms Nursery selected the trees and supervised the planting. The species included oak, hickory, and maple.
For each tree removed from the park, the city has committed to planting replacements. A large pile of logs from removed trees remained nearby — evidence of how much had come down before the replanting began.
City Manager Theriot closed the April 8 meeting with two words she used twice, as if to make sure they landed: apocalypse optimist. A sign-up sheet circulated before the meeting ended, collecting names of residents willing to help move things forward.
The alarm that spread through community emails was real, she suggested — and so was the path forward.
Celeste Connemacher, a beekeeper and president of the Albion Area Historical Society who attended the meeting, put it simply: “They are living history.”
