' beside Scioto River OH '

It's never been wanting for moisture in a riverside location like that.

Good growing conditions make for the largest trees.

That's indeed a phenomenal specimen that's for sure !!

An impressive tree, you were lucky to experience that one up-close.. Per the Ohio DNR, the state (and national) champion is a multiple-trunked tree in Ashland County (although there is apparently some debate about whether it is actually a single tree). There are definitely some monster sycamores down there in buckeye land.

arbordave, it certainly wasn't me measuring that.... Last time I was in OH was a business trip prb'ly in the mid-1990s. And I never had time to do anything there but business and traveling.

As an aside, on such a business trip, I remember crossing a bridge from WV to OH and seeing along the OH river floodplain a big planting of baldcypresses -- must've been a hundred or more of them, and they weren't young, prb'ly all at 60-70 ft high. It wasn't my usual crossing at Point Pleasant, WV, but IIRC at Marietta, OH.

I also recall from those trips the massive plantings of Scots pines just north of Beckley, WV alongside Rt 77 that went on for many miles. At that time they weren't yet diseased w/pine-blight.

One Big Tree, that's for sure.