You may have heard about “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” a 1945 movie. It was based on a semi-autobiographical novel about perseverance and hope amidst hardship of a young girl growing up poor in Brooklyn in the early 1900s.
But you may not have heard about “A Cedar Tree Grows at Jefferson,” a modern non-fiction work featuring a U.S. House member and an entire first-grade class at Jefferson Elementary School in Kingsport in 2021.
The star is a cedar tree, an eastern red cedar to be exact, planted just in time to be the unofficial outdoor Christmas tree of Jefferson. And the soon-to-unfold story the congresswoman tells is about students growing as they see the tree growing.
On a frosty December Monday morning, U.S. Rep. Diana Harshbarger, R-1st, helped plant the cedar given to her by a Gray-based industry called IES Inc.