Chicago is a young city on old prairie, and its oldest trees are the prairie's survivors: bur oaks that stood here before the city had a name. One shaded the Midway while the 1893 World's Fair rose around it, and a Norwood Park savanna remnant may be older than the United States. Out in the county's forest preserves stand ranked champions, among them hackberries and white oaks. The famous zoo oak fell in 2023. Fourteen of the sixteen are free; the two golf-course champions generally need a green fee.
0 of 16 visited in Chicago
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 230-320 years · Hyde Park
When the Midway Plaisance was cleared and regraded for the 1893 World's Fair, one tree was left standing, and this is it. By then it was already substantial enough that the ecologist Henry Cowles used it in his 1901 textbook as the example of its kind. Accounts of the fair place it behind the Sitting Bull's Cabin exhibit and the ostrich farm concession, neither of which lasted the year. Sources disagree on how it got here, and it is worth stating both. The University of Chicago Magazine quotes a campus environment official describing it as ostensibly planted as part of a Native American exhibit during the fair itself. The better supported account, from the Hyde Park historian Gary Ossewaarde, from Cowles in 1901 and from a local history record of a 2024 trunk measurement, has it standing long before 1893 and deliberately spared. That measurement reportedly ran past the largest bur oak on the Morton Arboretum's own growth reference chart, which would push it beyond the 250 or so years usually quoted. Bur oak is the tree of the prairie edge in this part of Illinois, corky barked enough to survive the fires that kept the grassland open. This one is the last of that landscape left on the Midway. It stands near Ellis Avenue, in front of the university hospital, on a pin that is close rather than surveyed.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 200-300 years · Jackson Park / Hyde Park
One of these oaks blew down around 2016, and its rings were counted back to roughly 1730. It had been standing for nearly three centuries when it fell. The ones still up are of the same generation: DNAinfo reported 250 year old bur oaks across the island, with a red oak of about 150 among them. Wooded Island is the part of the 1893 World's Fair that was deliberately left alone. Frederick Law Olmsted kept buildings off it entirely while the Court of Honor went up in white plaster to the south, and fair era painters kept turning their backs on the architecture to paint these oaks instead. The island sits on an undisturbed sand ridge, which is why the soil under the trees was never scraped and rebuilt the way the rest of Jackson Park was. In 2016 the Army Corps of Engineers spent 8.1 million dollars restoring the habitat here and wrote the old bur oaks into the plan, along with roughly 120 bur oak saplings that had seeded themselves around their parents. An oak stand actually reproducing inside a city is a rare thing to stand in. The place to stand is the path just south of the Osaka Garden, looking into the south end of the island, where the grove reads as one thing rather than as scattered trees.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 300-375 years · Norwood Park
The oldest oak in this grove has been estimated at 325 to 375 years, which would make it roughly two centuries older than the city around it. It was already a mature prairie tree when Chicago was a portage and a fort. The figure comes from Scott Carlini, quoted in a 2016 hunt for the city's oldest tree, and it is based on trunk diameter rather than a ring core, so treat it as directional. We found no second independent estimate, which is why this entry stays flagged. What is solid is the setting. Union Ridge took its first burial in 1841 and is described by the Norwood Park Historical Society as the oldest continuously operating cemetery in Chicago. The ground was open prairie before it was platted, and what stands here is a genuine relict bur oak savanna: widely spaced, heavy limbed trees with daylight between them, which is what oaks look like when they grow up in grassland rather than in forest. Bur oak's thick corky bark let it survive the fires that kept that prairie open, and the graves that arrived in 1841 put an end to both the fires and the plough. It is a working cemetery, so come during posted visiting hours and behave like a guest. The pin is the entrance; the old section and its oaks are inside the grounds.
Box Elder (Acer negundo) · 60-100 years · Forest Glen / Edgebrook
Boxelder is the tree nobody wants. It seeds itself into alleys and back lots, drops limbs, hosts the boxelder bugs that get into houses in autumn, and is generally written off as a weed that never lives long enough to get big. This one is the biggest known in Illinois. The state's Big Tree Register, run by University of Illinois Extension, ranks it champion of its species: just over nine feet around the trunk, 55 feet tall, a crown spreading 35 feet, and 172.3 points on the register's scoring formula, ahead of the runner up down in Shawnee National Forest at the far southern end of the state. It was measured and listed in 2026 with a dated photograph, so it is standing now. One honesty note, and it is the reason this entry is flagged: the register is the only source we could find on it. The Sun-Times feature on the state's big trees, the Extension's own announcement and the Forest Preserves champion list all fail to mention it, most likely because the title is very new. No Illinois register carries an age field either, so nobody has dated this tree and we are not going to guess at it. Visiting is a golf question. It stands on Edgebrook Golf Course, a public course run by the Forest Preserves of Cook County, which normally means a green fee to walk the fairways, and whether it can be seen from the perimeter is unconfirmed.
Red Pine (Pinus resinosa) · 50-100 years · Dunning
This is the state champion red pine of Illinois, and it holds the title partly for want of competition. The Illinois Big Tree Register lists exactly one red pine anywhere in the state, and this is the one, standing on the Indian Boundary golf course on Chicago's northwest side. Its 153.52 points come from a trunk 6.8 feet around, a height of 64 feet and a crown spreading 31.5 feet, measured and listed in 2026, which doubles as the freshest evidence that it is alive and thriving. Nobody has dated it. Red pine is a northern species, well outside its natural range down here, so this is a planted tree rather than a relic of anything, and the register carries no age field for any entry. Any figure attached to this tree is worked backwards from its trunk rather than measured, and should be read that way. What is documented is the size, and for Pinus resinosa the giveaway is the needles: paired, three to six inches long, snapping cleanly in half when you bend one. Access is the honest problem. Indian Boundary is a public 18 hole course run by the Forest Preserves of Cook County, so walking the fairways generally means paying a green fee, and whether the tree can be seen or reached from outside the course was not established. Ask at the clubhouse before planning the trip.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 230-300 years · Oak Park (day trip from Chicago, not within city limits)
Local history holds that this bur oak was a witness tree, a landmark the Potawatomi used to find the route back to the Des Plaines River after a hunt. Oak Park's own paper, the Wednesday Journal, reported that reading in 2014 along with the claim that it is the oldest parkway tree in the village. Its age depends on which article you open. The 2014 survey puts it at about 230 years. A 2011 piece in the same paper, written when Openlands and the Morton Arboretum gathered its acorns for a historic oak propagation project, calls it three centuries old. That is a gap of seventy years, nobody has resolved it, and both figures stand here rather than one being quietly chosen. There is a harder caveat. No source has confirmed this tree alive since that 2014 article. In October 2025 another Oak Park heritage bur oak of the same generation, over on Forest Avenue, was removed after disease took it. That was a different tree at a different address, but the cohort is visibly failing, so go expecting an oak and not a guarantee. It stands on the parkway, the village-owned strip between sidewalk and street, in front of a private house on North Kenilworth Avenue in the Hemingway district. Public ground, so stay on the pavement. Oak Park is not Chicago but the suburb immediately west, 20 to 25 minutes from the Loop on the Green Line.
Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) · Busse Forest South
This sugar maple stands 36.6 metres tall, 120 feet, and the Forest Preserves of Cook County rank it second among all the sugar maples on their land. Their champion tree register measured it on 25 August 2023: a trunk 2.47 metres round at chest height, and a crown spreading 22 metres one way and only 12 the other.
That shape is what makes it worth the walk. A trunk under two and a half metres round is slim for a tree of this height, and the narrow crown tells the same story: this maple went up rather than out. Compare the Comfort Maple in Pelham, Ontario, another sugar maple on our map, whose trunk is six metres round. The Busse tree carries well under half that girth, yet the county's champion hackberry at Thatcher Woods, the biggest of its kind on preserve land, is recorded at exactly the same 120 feet.
Busse Forest South holds two more ranked trees: the county's champion basswood, about two and a half kilometres to the west, and its third-ranked basswood a little further north. Three register trees in one preserve make an afternoon of it.
The register records size, rank and place, and nothing about age. Nobody has dated this maple. If you know how old it is, or what stood here before the preserve, tell us. Come in October, when sugar maples colour.
Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) · Thatcher Woods
This silver maple's trunk is 4.27 metres round, and in October 2023 the Forest Preserves of Cook County measured it as the second-biggest silver maple on all their land. It stands 26.8 metres tall, with a crown about 18.6 metres across one way and 13 the other.
Four metres of girth is a lot of trunk for a silver maple. On our own map, the Silver Maple of Wołoska in Warsaw measures 3.39 metres round at 20 metres tall, and Bruges' Canada Tree, planted in 1947, measures 2.44. Only two silver maples we list with a recorded girth are thicker: one in Warsaw's Park Zaslawa Malickiego at 5.02 metres, and Montreal's McKenna Silver Maple at 5.81.
What makes Thatcher Woods unusual is the company. Within 80 metres of this maple the register lists two more ranked trees, both hackberries: the county's champion, and its second-ranked, which at 39 metres is the taller of the two. Three register trees inside one short loop make this the easiest stop of the lot.
The register gives size, rank and place, and nothing more: no planting date, no history, no age. Nobody has dated this maple. If you know how old it is, or have photographs of it from years back, tell us.
Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) · Thatcher Woods
This is the biggest hackberry the Forest Preserves of Cook County have on their land, ranked first in their champion tree register. Measured in November 2023, it stands 36.6 metres tall on a trunk 3.51 metres round, under a crown about 22 metres wide in both directions.
For scale, the only other hackberry of this species we have measured is the Leaning Hackberry of Parco Treves in Padua: 1.55 metres round and 9 metres tall. The Thatcher Woods champion has more than twice its girth and four times its height.
It is not even the tallest hackberry in these woods. About 66 metres away stands the county's second-ranked hackberry, slimmer at 3.35 metres round but taller at 39 metres. The register still ranks the thicker, wider tree first. A silver maple ranked second in the county stands between the two, so three register trees share one short stretch of woodland.
Another hackberry, at National Grove, matches this trunk exactly at 3.51 metres and ranks third, two and a half metres shorter.
The register says nothing about age, and nobody has dated this tree. If you know how old it is, or have watched it over the years, tell us.
Common Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) · National Grove
Of the three hackberries at the top of the Forest Preserves of Cook County's champion register, this one has the widest crown: about 23.5 metres one way and 21.6 the other, measured in December 2023. The register places it third among all the hackberries on preserve land.
Its trunk is 3.51 metres round, exactly the girth of the county champion at Thatcher Woods, about seven kilometres to the north. What separates them is height. The champion stands 36.6 metres, this tree 34.1, and the second-ranked hackberry at Thatcher Woods reaches 39. Three trees of one species, within 16 centimetres of each other in girth and all past 34 metres tall: Cook County grows hackberries big.
The gap with the rest of our map is wider. The only other hackberry of this species we have measured, the Leaning Hackberry of Parco Treves in Padua, is 1.55 metres round and 9 metres tall. National Grove's tree is nearly four times as tall, and its crown spans more than two and a half times the Padua tree's whole height.
Unlike the Thatcher pair, it has no ranked neighbour on our map. It is a stop of its own.
The register records size, rank and site, and no age. Nobody has dated this hackberry. If you know how old it is, tell us.
White Oak (Quercus alba) · Red Gate Woods
The champion white oak of the Forest Preserves of Cook County is not the thickest white oak they have measured. It wins on everything else. When the register's surveyors measured it in May 2024, they recorded a trunk 4.21 metres round, a height of 29.3 metres and a crown about 23 metres across in both directions, nearly a perfect circle.
The county's second-ranked white oak, at McClaughrey Springs Woods about five kilometres to the southeast, has the fatter trunk at 4.76 metres. It is also eight metres shorter and narrower in the crown, and the register puts Red Gate Woods first.
Our map holds some famous white oaks to measure it against. The Devil's Den Witness Tree at Gettysburg is 4.11 metres round, a whisker thinner than this one. The Ruxton Liberty Tree in Baltimore reaches 5.49 metres and the Travilah Oak outside Washington 5.82. Red Gate Woods' champion does not match those two for girth. What it has is balance: height, trunk and crown together, enough to make it the county's champion.
The register gives size, rank and site, and no age, and girth alone is a poor clock for an oak. Nobody has dated this one. If you know how old it is, or have a core count, tell us.
White Oak (Quercus alba) · McClaughrey Springs Woods
This white oak is 4.76 metres round at chest height, more than half a metre thicker than the county's champion white oak, and it still ranks second. The Forest Preserves of Cook County measured it in June 2024.
What it lacks is height. The champion at Red Gate Woods, about five kilometres to the northwest, is thinner at 4.21 metres but stands 29.3 metres tall. This one stops at 21, with a crown about 21 metres one way and 17 the other. Short and heavy against tall and even: the register prefers the second, a visitor may well prefer the first.
For comparison, the Devil's Den Witness Tree at Gettysburg, another white oak on our map, is 4.11 metres round. The Ruxton Liberty Tree in Baltimore, at 5.49, and the Travilah Oak near Washington, at 5.82, are bigger still, but McClaughrey Springs' oak is in that company.
The surveyors left two notes. It stands at the edge of a trail, which makes it easy to reach. And it shows some branch dieback, which is worth knowing before you go and worth telling us about if you see it worsen.
The register gives no age, and nobody has dated this oak. If you know how old it is, tell us.
Sassafras (Sassafras albidum) · Thorn Creek Division
This sassafras is only 12.2 metres tall, and its trunk is 3.26 metres round. That makes it the biggest sassafras the Forest Preserves of Cook County have on their land, ranked first in their champion register when it was measured in July 2024.
Those two numbers sit oddly together, which is the reason to go. Set it beside another tree on our Chicago page, the county's second-ranked sugar maple at Busse Forest South: the maple is three times as tall, at 36.6 metres, and its trunk is thinner, at 2.47. The sassafras put its growth into girth. The crown follows suit, about 13 metres one way and 9 the other, low and compact over a trunk that would look at home on a tree twice its height.
It stands far from the other champions on this page, at Thorn Creek Division in southern Cook County, so it is a trip of its own rather than a stop on a walk.
The only other sassafras on our map stands in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, and we hold no measurement for it, so for now this is the one with numbers.
The register gives no age, and nobody has dated this tree. If you know how old it is, tell us. Come in October, when sassafras turns orange and red.
American Basswood (Tilia americana) · Busse Forest South
This is the biggest basswood on all the land of the Forest Preserves of Cook County, first in their champion tree register. Its trunk is 3.91 metres round, and it stands 24.4 metres tall under a crown about 16 metres one way and 17 the other.
The same preserve holds the county's third-ranked basswood, about 730 metres to the north, and the two are an instructive pair. They are exactly the same height, 24.4 metres each. The difference is all in the trunk: this one is 80 centimetres thicker round, and the register ranks it first and the other third. Stand at one and then the other, and you are looking at the same species, the same height and the same woods, with the champion simply carrying more wood.
Busse Forest South holds a third ranked tree as well, the county's second-ranked sugar maple, about two and a half kilometres to the east and twelve metres taller than either basswood. Together they make a long walk past three trees the county has measured and ranked.
The register records the size and place but no measurement date, and nothing about age. Nobody has dated this basswood. If you know how old it is, or when it was last measured, tell us.
American Basswood (Tilia americana) · Busse Forest South
This basswood is the third biggest the Forest Preserves of Cook County have measured on their land, and it stands just 730 metres from the champion. The two are exactly the same height, 24.4 metres each.
Where they part is the trunk. This one is 3.11 metres round against the champion's 3.91. Its crown, though, is the wider of the two, about 19 metres one way and 16 the other, so from a distance it may look the larger tree. Up close, the trunk tells them apart, and the register ranks this one third.
That makes Busse Forest South a good place to train your eye. Walk between the two basswoods and you see how much a species can vary in one woodland: same height, same ground, eighty centimetres of trunk between them. The preserve's other ranked tree, the county's second-ranked sugar maple, stands about two and a half kilometres to the southeast and rises to 36.6 metres, half as tall again as either basswood.
The register records size and place but no date of measurement and no age. Nobody has dated this tree. If you know how old it is, or have measured it yourself, tell us.
Pin Oak (Quercus palustris) · Rolling Knolls
This pin oak's crown spreads about 26 metres one way and 22 the other, on a tree only 29 metres tall. It is the champion pin oak of the Forest Preserves of Cook County, first among all those on preserve land, and it is nearly as wide as it is high.
The trunk is 3.59 metres round. Put the tree beside the county's champion white oak at Red Gate Woods, itself notable for a broad, even crown: that oak is 29.3 metres tall, almost the same, yet its crown is about three metres narrower across its widest line. No crown among the Cook County champions on our Chicago page spreads further than this one.
Pin oaks are familiar on our map from the other side of the Atlantic. We list them in Dutch parks in Haarlem, Apeldoorn, Eindhoven and Sittard, where the registers record planting dates between the 1860s and about 1910. None of those carries a measured trunk or crown on our pages, so this champion is the first pin oak we can describe in numbers.
Rolling Knolls lies at the far western edge of the trees on this page, a trip of its own rather than part of a walk.
The register records no measurement date and no age. Nobody has dated this oak. If you know how old it is, tell us.