The Battle Oaks

Three live oaks stand on the rise at the north end of the original forty acres, and they were there before the university was. When the University of Texas opened in 1883 they were already old, the survivors of a larger grove. The story told on campus is that the rest came down during the Civil War, cut to raise a fortification when word arrived that Union troops had reached Galveston, and that these three were left. They nearly went in 1923 instead, when the site was picked for the Biology building. William Battle, a professor of Classics chairing the faculty building committee, argued them out of the plan. They carry his name rather than the war's, which seems like the right outcome. The university puts the group at two hundred and fifty to three hundred years and reckons the largest predates the Civil War outright, making them among the oldest living things on campus. A plaque at the foot tells the whole thing in fewer words than this.