Not a single snowflake softened the harsh winter-brown of Grant Woods Forest Preserve when naturalist Al Westerman crunched through the underbrush on a routine reconnaissance mission one late December day.
The forester was surveying tree damage that had been caused by overzealous snowmobilers who earlier had blazed an illegal trail through a remote area of the 778-acre forest preserve near Fox Lake that is owned by the Lake County Forest Preserve District.
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But Westerman’s ecological sleuthing turned up something far from routine. He discovered a Kentucky coffee tree, a species never before reported in the wild in Lake County.
“Lo and behold what do I see but this huge tree,” he said. “And I thought, `This is a very unusual tree.’ “
So he walked up to it, walked around it and then, he said, “I started jumping up and down.”
For Westerman, a forester by training and a history buff in his spare time, the discovery was akin to finding a diamond in a woodpile.
The Kentucky coffee tree, Gymnocladus dioicus, grows in the wild in Kentucky, in southern and central Illinois and in a few places in southern Cook County. It’s a member of the legume family, which includes peas and beans, and its seeds are commonly called beans.
While it does well in northern areas where it has been planted as an ornamental tree by those who admire long graceful branches and tropical-looking leaves, it has never been recorded as growing in the wild in Lake County since local naturalists started keeping plant records 100 years ago.
Further investigation at Grant Woods turned up a small colony of the trees with a total of five mature trees up to 75 feet high, plus smaller saplings and seedlings.
The tree is said to have been valued by settlers who used the beans for concocting a bitter brew that was used as a substitute for coffee.
In addition, old groves of the Kentucky coffee tree are thought to mark Indian camps or villages, Westerman said.
Indians were thought to have used the seeds, or beans, from the trees for trading or as markers in a game of dice. It is thought that the hard, shiny beans were carried from place to place and then perhaps accidentally dropped on the ground where they eventually grew into a grove of trees.
But in the case of Grant Woods, the origins of the coffee tree grove is a mystery. While the site is within a half-mile of old Indian trails, there are no archeological signs of an Indian community or gathering place where the seeds might have been carried and left behind.