The Son of the Tree That Owns Itself

This oak is the son of a tree that, by local legend, owned itself. The Athens Weekly Banner ran the story in 1890: Colonel William H. Jackson, fond of the white oak he had played under as a boy, deeded the tree ownership of itself and of the land within eight feet of its trunk. Legal scholars have picked holes in it ever since, on the reasonable ground that a tree cannot hold property, and Athens has never much minded. The original came down in a windstorm in 1942. On 4 December 1946 the Junior Ladies Garden Club planted a seedling raised from one of its acorns in the same plot, five feet tall and trimmed back to three for the move, with University of Georgia horticulture students turning the soil. It passed fifty feet by 2006. So the tree on the corner of South Finley and Dearing is about eighty years old rather than two hundred, and what it inherited was an acorn and a deed. Read it that way and it gets better rather than worse: the legend belongs to a tree that fell, and this one carries the name and the plot. A historical marker stands at the corner. There is no gate, no fee and no opening hours, and by the terms of a will nobody has ever tested in court, no landlord either.