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.
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Getting there
427 N Kenilworth Ave, Oak Park, IL 60302 (village parkway, Hemingway District)
You can recognise it by where it stands, on the village parkway strip between sidewalk and street outside 427 N Kenilworth Avenue. Nobody has confirmed it alive since 2014, so go expecting an oak and not a guarantee.
Free, public parkway tree (the strip of village-owned land between sidewalk and street), viewable from the public right of way; it fronts a private residence so stay on the parkway/sidewalk
CTA Green Line to Oak Park Ave station, roughly 20 to 25 minutes from the Loop, then about a 10 minute walk north; alternatively Metra Union Pacific West Line to Oak Park station
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.