I remember this was a big tree when I was an elementary student at Weaver in the early 1980s. If anything, I remember it was bigger. The tree still exists as of 2025 and is quite gnarly.
For some time before his death, Rutherford had a small hernia, which he neglected to have fixed, and it became strangulated, rendering him violently ill. Despite an emergency operation in London, he died four days afterwards, at Cambridge on 19 October 1937 at age 66, of what physicians termed “intestinal paralysis”.
