The Ruxton Liberty Tree

Keeping this oak alive takes 5,000 gallons of water a week. The family who own the lawn it grows on pay for that, and for the fungicide treatments against the phytophthora working at its roots, because the tree leaning over Bellona Avenue was a seedling around 1646, twelve years after the first English colonists landed in Maryland. By 1694 it was big enough to be useful. Surveyors used it to mark the boundary between two land grants, Young Man's Adventure and Samuel Hope, in the same year Maryland moved its government from St Mary's City to Annapolis. It outlasted the Bellona Gunpowder Works, which supplied ammunition for the War of 1812 nearby, and it was already close to two centuries old when the Baltimore and Susquehanna Railroad came through in the 1830s. Local legend has Abraham Lincoln catching sight of it from a train in 1863. Nobody has ever sourced that, and it is repeated here as legend rather than fact. The Baltimore Sun measured it in 2002 at over 100 feet tall, with a canopy spanning roughly 150 feet and a trunk 18 feet around. A more recent account of the man who cares for it calls it nearly 400 years old and describes the watering still going on. It grows on private ground. Stand on the road beneath the branches and look up, which is as far as anyone should go.