[Picture of Mongomery Arboretum]

The Montgomery Arboretum

Located just north and west of the Castle Drive Gates lies the "Campus Woods" or Montgomery Arboretum. Part of original land deeded to Northern by Joseph F. Glidden in 1893, former School President Leslie A. Holmes dedicated the area as a preserve and named it for Charles Edgar Montgomery in 1957. The arboretum could be up to 1,000 years old and may perhaps be virgin forest. Dr. Montgomery served as a biology professor and Head of the Biology Department at Northern from 1917 to 1952. The building of Montgomery Hall and the Psychology-Computer Science Building reduced the Arboretum to less than one-third its original size. The original area at one time contained trees(the shagbark hickory, the burr oak, the slippery elm and the linden), eight species of mammals, seventy-eight species of birds, sixty-eight species of one group of mold, ten species of shrubs and saplings, and eleven species of moss.


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