For six years in the 1880s, the largest living tree on Earth was not named for the Union general who gave it its current name. It was named for Karl Marx, and the people who renamed it did so on purpose, as a direct political statement against the man the tree had originally honored.
The tree never moved. Its name did, twice, and both times the choice had everything to do with who was in charge of the land it stood on, not with anything the tree itself had done.
Named by a Man Who Served Under Him
James Wolverton named the tree in 1879, honoring General William Tecumseh Sherman, under whom he had served during the Civil War. It was a personal choice by one man with no official park authority behind it. Sequoia National Park itself wouldn't exist for another thirteen years, so there was no agency, no board, and no formal process. A veteran picked a name for a tree he admired, and for a while, that was simply what people called it.
The Kaweah Colony's Protest
In 1886, the Kaweah Colony, a utopian socialist community that had settled in the area to log the giant sequoias, gained control of the land and renamed the tree after Karl Marx. This wasn't a casual rebranding. The colony pointed directly to Sherman's role commanding the government's military campaigns against Native nations as their reason for rejecting his name. For six years, this same tree, the largest living thing most people will ever stand next to, carried the name of the founder of modern communist theory instead of a Civil War general's.
Walk the Giant Forest Loop
General Sherman is one stop on a short loop through Giant Forest that also reaches Moro Rock and Tunnel Log. The trip planner maps the whole route.
Open the Trip PlannerNot the Tallest. Not the Widest. The Most.
The colony dissolved in 1892, the same year Sequoia National Park was established, and Sherman's name reverted once there was no longer anyone around with a reason to reject it. Today, by the National Park Service's own measurements, the tree stands 274.9 feet tall with a base diameter of 36.5 feet and a ground-level circumference of 102.6 feet, adding up to roughly 52,500 cubic feet of wood. That combination of height, width, and how little the trunk tapers as it rises makes it the largest known living tree on Earth by total volume, not the tallest tree in the world and not the widest, but the one with the most actual wood in it.
- Named for Sherman 1879
- Renamed for Marx 1886–1892
- Height 274.9 FT
- Volume ~52,500 CU. FT
What It Took to Protect It in 2021
In September 2021, the KNP Complex Fire burned toward Giant Forest, and firefighters wrapped the lower ten to fifteen feet of General Sherman's trunk in a protective aluminum material designed to keep flames from reaching old fire scars at the base. Giant sequoias have survived low-intensity fire for thousands of years as part of their natural life cycle, but the scale and heat of recent Sierra wildfires has been enough to kill mature trees that would once have shrugged off a burn. The wrapping held, the fire's behavior stayed moderate in that stretch, and the tree that had already survived a name change twice made it through a wildfire too.
Facts and figures checked against NPS.gov's General Sherman Tree page for official dimensions and its 2021 KNP Complex Fire protection account, cross-referenced against the tree's documented naming history.
James Wolverton picked a name in 1879 with no idea it would be argued over within a decade. The Kaweah Colony renamed it not because they misunderstood who Sherman was, but because they understood exactly who he was and objected. The tree outlasted the colony, outlasted the argument, and in 2021 needed nothing more sophisticated than aluminum foil to outlast a wildfire too. Whatever anyone calls it, it's still there.