When David Abbott moved to his home on West Alna Road in Alna 47 years ago, a Red Delicious apple tree stood just into the back yard.

“It was already a mature tree,” said Abbott, who serves as first selectman in the town named for the alder tree.

Over the years, the family’s children would play on and around the apple tree. It gave shade to the picnic table, and bore fruit that was used for pies and jelly. More recently, it was starting to show its age.

It had some dead wood on it, Abbott said.

Then came the storm earlier this month. After withstanding an unknown number of decades of ice storms and other weather, the tree became uprooted and went down in the yard.

Probably the soaked ground helped the roots come loose, Alna Town Clerk Amy Warner said when Abbott brought up the tree’s undoing at the selectmen’s Nov. 5 meeting.

There was no agenda and, along with talk about the outcome of elections and other ballot items the night before, the board’s conversation touched on the storm. A resident had reported mailbox damage. The town will help him get a form to fill out for the plowing contractor. It looked like the damage was from plowed snow, rather than a direct hit from a plow blade, Warner said.

Abbott, a champion archer, had gone to an archery event and driven home in the storm. The storm took took down a tree behind the town office, possibly a spruce, Warner said. And out front, the silver maple planted when the town office property was a family’s home, lost another limb.

The loss of the old apple tree at his house surprised Abbott.

“I wouldn’t have thought it would do that,” he said about the storm, although it also made a mess of the woods near his home.

On Monday, the apple tree remained where it fell, on a lawn green again with no trace of the heavy, wet snow from a week earlier. A couple of apples lay near its branches. Abbott planned to cut up the the downed tree for its last purpose, as firewood.