What is the oldest tree in Chicago?

Chicago's relationship with old trees is mostly a story of what the prairie kept. The city itself is young, incorporated in 1837, and it burned in 1871, so almost nothing planted stands out for age. What survives is what was already here: bur oaks, the prairie's fire-resistant veterans, in the few corners the city never quite got around to flattening. The best known of them, the bur oak at Lincoln Park Zoo that generations called Chicago's oldest tree, was cut down in May 2023 after it died, which quietly promoted the others. The Midway oak in Hyde Park carries a genuine dispute, one university account says it was planted for the 1893 fair, others say the fair was built around it, and its page gives both versions. The Union Ridge savanna's ages rest on a single expert's estimate and say so. That honesty matters here more than in most cities, because the register Illinois keeps for its champion trees records size, not age, and a champion is not automatically ancient.