The Bur Oak on the Midway

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.