At all
events the Roussillon cherry tree disappeared long ago, nobody
living knows how, and with it also vanished, quite as
mysteriously, all traces of the once important Roussillon estate.
Not a record of the name even can be found, it is said, in church
or county books.
The old, twisted, gum-embossed cherry tree survived every other
distinguishing feature of what was once the most picturesque and
romantic place in Vincennes. Just north of it stood, in the early
French days, a low, rambling cabin surrounded by rude verandas
overgrown with grapevines. This was the Roussillon place, the most
pretentious home in all the Wabash country. Its owner was Gaspard
Roussillon, a successful trader with the Indians. He was rich, for
the time and the place, influential to a degree, a man of some
education, who had brought with him to the wilderness a bundle of
books and a taste for reading.
From faded letters and dimly remembered talk of those who once
clung fondly to the legends and traditions of old Vincennes, it is
drawn that the Roussillon cherry tree stood not very far away from
the present site of the Catholic church, on a slight swell of
ground overlooking a wide marshy flat and the silver current of
the Wabash. If the tree grew there, then there too stood the
Roussillon house with its cosy log rooms, its clay-daubed chimneys
and its grapevine-mantled verandas, while some distance away and
nearer the river the rude fort with its huddled officers' quarters
seemed to fling out over the wild landscape, through its squinting
and lopsided port-holes, a gaze of stubborn defiance.
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