American Elm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_elm

Ulmus americana is the tree you're thinking of, if you know anything about popular US trees that happened to nearly get wiped out because of Dutch Elm Disease. It's a larger tree, as one can see, and was practically perfect: it's fast growing but still has good wood (a lot of fast growing trees stink when it comes to wood quality); it rarely splits  - limbs can have some angles and it deals with that just fine; the internal veins of the tree are actually criss-crossed and this adds some strength to the wood. 

Due to its awesomeness it became the most widely planted tree in the US. 

People planted it everywhere. It went in yards, down streetsides.. The fungus would then go from one tree to the next and the next: limbs often touched each other, which was, in hindsight, a bad idea.

Now we have genus' (cultivars: not naturally occurring 'hybrids') that were bred to fight off Dutch Elm Disease. The disease was easily spread by beetles carrying the fungal infection, which essentially would freak out the tree and it would begin to start losing limbs (imagine cutting off body parts to escape never-ending gangrene, or flesh eating disease.)  Eventually, the whole tree dies from its own attempt to block off the offending presence of the fungus. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_elm

I happen to like the bark. It has some shape to it, and some highlights. It has no real uniform presence, but rather seems to have furrows that flow down the trunk as if water used to exist on it. 

http://www.sfrc.ufl.edu/4h/AmericanElm/AmericanElmLeafWeb.jpg

 These leaves are what we call pinnate: there are 7, where the odd-leaf-out is at the tip. They're serrated and rough (like the willow, remember?) and are bilaterally asymmetrical: folding them in half doesn't give any superimposition; one side of the half will be bigger than the other.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_elm

The tree has decent fall color, but if fall color is what you're looking for then I'd personally go elsewhere. However, I can't really say that's a good idea: the American Elm is a very pretty, robust type of tree. Dutch Elm, of course, is always a fear, but there are cultivars being developed that resist this problem better and better as time goes on. Eventually, our pretty tree will be back. I wonder if it'll be as popular once more??