Century Tree

The crown of the Century Tree spreads about 101 feet, more than twice as wide as the tree is tall. Nobody wrote down when it was planted. A 1908 bulletin from the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station describes a live oak set out in 1891 on the hard-tramped parade ground, an 18-inch sapling that had reached 28 feet in sixteen years. In 2018 KBTX reported that the bulletin's photograph shows this tree beside Old Main, and a Texas A&M Forest Service forester calls it a good candidate. Before that match, the best guess was around 1900 or later. So it is somewhere between about 110 and 135 years old, and every account of it comes from the university or the local station. Old Main burned in 1912. The oak outlived it, and its roots are said to have found a cistern under the lost building. About a decade ago it measured some 45 feet tall with a trunk nearly 11 feet round. Oak wilt struck trees nearby and has not been seen in this one; the grounds arborist pruned its deadwood and fed the soil after a nitrogen shortfall. Campus tradition says a couple who walk beneath it together stay together, which is why people propose and marry here. In 2025 the university cloned it, rooting more than 40 copies. It is young for this map. History and that crown are what earn it a place.