The Angel Oak

The souvenirs say 1,500 years. The city that owns the tree says 300 to 400, and an academic estimate stretches it to 500. That gap is not carelessness, it is live oak. The species grows fast when young, slows unpredictably and rots out from the middle while the crown is still healthy, so there is no core to pull and nothing to count. What can be measured is girth, and every estimate that starts from the tree itself lands in the hundreds of years rather than the thousands. None of the size is in dispute. The trunk runs 25 and a half feet round by the city's figure, 28 by another. The crown shades around 17,000 square feet, a quarter of an acre under one tree, and the longest limb travels 187 feet before it stops. Live oak does not race upward; it spreads until the branches come back down and rest on the ground, which is why most of this tree is at eye level. The name is prosaic. Justus Angel and Martha Waight Tucker Angel owned the estate, and the tree took their surname. The local stories about the spirits of enslaved people appearing among the branches came afterwards. Hurricane Hugo went over it in 1989 and it recovered. The city bought the land in 1991 and now runs it as a free park taking around 400,000 visitors a year.