The Kenilworth Witness Oak

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.