Two of the trees on this page stand in Dealey Plaza, and the shots fired at President Kennedy in 1963 passed through the canopy of one of them. The rest of Dallas is quieter and older: a bur oak of 250 years in Reverchon Park, another of 235 beside a spring in the Great Trinity Forest, a bent pecan the Comanche Nation recognises as a trail marker, and a grove of post oaks in a downtown cemetery, standing since before the Constitution was signed.
0 of 12 visited in Dallas
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 85-90 years · West End Historic District
The shots fired at President Kennedy on 22 November 1963 passed through this canopy. The limousine came out from behind the tree on Elm Street, and the live oak has stood over that spot ever since. It is the most photographed patch of ground in America and hardly anyone looks at the trees.
The Texas Historic Tree Coalition named this one the line-of-sight tree when it declared the Dealey Plaza grove historic on 6 November 1999, and measured it the same day: 30 feet tall, a crown spreading 60 feet, a trunk 97 inches round. The grove went in with the plaza itself in the late 1930s, which puts these oaks a little short of ninety years, young for this list and full grown by 1963. Ten wide, low-branched live oaks stood in the plaza on the day, and live oaks stand there now.
Dealey Plaza was made a National Historic Landmark District in 1993. The trees got a designation of their own six years later, which is rare: historic sites usually protect the buildings and leave the planting to take its chances. No source publishes a coordinate for the tree, so the pin marks the pergola end of the plaza rather than the trunk. The plaza is small enough that this costs you nothing.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 85-90 years · West End Historic District
The grassy knoll is a slope with oaks on it, which is the part the photographs never quite show. This is the largest of them, and the largest of the three trees measured by name when the Texas Historic Tree Coalition declared the Dealey Plaza grove historic on 6 November 1999: 40 feet tall, a crown spreading 96 feet, a trunk 125 inches round.
The knoll is the low rise on the north side of Elm Street, and it is one of the most argued-over pieces of ground in the country. Some witnesses to the shooting of 22 November 1963 believed a shot came from behind the picket fence at the top of it. Police who went up there found no gunman. The oak was already a broad tree by then, planted with the rest of the grove in the late 1930s when the plaza was laid out.
What you get standing here is the geometry that every account of that afternoon argues about, at ground level, in the shade of a tree that was in the frame. The line-of-sight oak is a minute away across Elm Street. No tree-level coordinate exists, so the pin marks the knoll itself, which is a compact and unmistakable landform: walk up the slope to the fence and you are there.
Post Oak (Quercus stellata) · Urbandale
The biggest post oak in Dallas County stands in a one-acre pioneer cemetery on Military Parkway, and nobody has dated it. The Texas Big Tree Registry put a tape around it on 10 September 2020 and recorded 166 inches of circumference, 50 feet of height and a 49 foot spread, which makes it the county champion of its species.
It shares the plot with more than seventy graves from the settlement era. George W. Glover acquired the land in 1844 and deeded it to his son William Wald Glover in 1872. The first burial was in 1857, a five year old called Sarah Beeman. The last was in 1951, after which the place went quiet and the oak carried on. Volunteers maintain it now, and a Texas historical marker stands at the gate.
Post oaks are slow growers with hard, dense wood, which is why they turn up as the oldest thing left standing on ground that has been farmed, grazed and built over. This one is thicker than any other recorded in the county, and no source gives it a year. If you know when it went in, or you have a tape measure and half an hour, tell us and we will put a number on this page. The register's own coordinate places the tree, so the pin is good.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 235 years · Pleasant Grove / Pemberton Hill, Great Trinity Forest
Sam Houston camped at this spring in the summer of 1843 with his Indian treaty delegation, and by the account of the arborists who later dated it, the bur oak beside the water was already about sixty years old. That was two years before Texas joined the union and while Dallas was a cabin and a ferry crossing.
The Texas Historic Tree Coalition made it an Official Historic Tree on 29 March 2014 and gathered its figures the same day: over 235 years old, 60 feet tall, a 65 foot crown, a trunk 47 inches through, so roughly twelve feet round. Add the decade since and it is closing on 250.
Big Spring is a natural spring in the Great Trinity Forest and one of the first places in the area that European settlers claimed, taken in 1842 by John Beeman, whose daughter Margaret married the founder of Dallas the following year. The city bought the spring and its bottomlands in 2003 and in 2016 made the surrounding fifteen acres a historic overlay district, the first time Dallas used that protection for a piece of ground rather than a building.
Park at the Texas Horse Park entrance on Pemberton Hill Road. The pin marks the preserve rather than the trunk, so expect to walk and look.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · 250 years · Oak Lawn
This bur oak was already a mature tree when John Neely Bryan turned up in 1841 and founded the city. The estimate is over 250 years, which puts its start in the 1770s, when the nearest thing to Dallas was a Caddo trail. It stands about 70 feet tall with a trunk roughly sixteen feet round.
It got its name in 1936, when a celebration for the centennial of Texan independence from Mexico was held at the tree rather than at any building, and it has been the Centennial Tree ever since. In 2015 the city gave it formal protection under its historic tree programme, so the oak now outranks most of what is built around it in Reverchon Park.
The age is worth reading carefully. It comes from one arborists' assessment rather than a ring count, and nobody has cored it. A bur oak with a sixteen foot waist is entirely consistent with two and a half centuries, and this species routinely gets there, but treat the number as a good estimate and not a measurement.
Reverchon Park runs down a slope off Maple Avenue near the Katy Trail. The pin marks the park rather than the trunk, so allow a few minutes of looking once you are inside the gates.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · 175 years · West Dallas
This pecan was standing at the Trinity crossing before anyone built a bridge over it. The first one went up in 1855, and the Texas Historic Tree Coalition dates the tree to more than 175 years, roughly the age of Dallas itself.
From that corner it watched the last bison herds and the men who shot them, then the cattle drives north on the Shawnee Trail, then a century of traffic that ended with a six-lane intersection at its feet. It sat in the Trinity floodplain through the floods of 1866, 1871, 1890 and 1908. In 2009 the city planned to redesign the intersection and the tree was in the way; a neighbour, Katherine Homan, ran a campaign that saved it. It has since lost three major limbs and been hit by vehicles more than once, and it is still in leaf. In 2023 it got a permanent designation plaque, which is a modest reward for surviving everything else.
Nobody has published a girth for it. If you get a tape around that trunk, send us the number.
The pin sits at the Beckley Avenue end of the Commerce Street bridge, on the south side of the junction, which is where the tree stands. Come by bike or car; there is no rail stop nearby.
Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · 75 years · West End Historic District / Downtown
In 1998 the city and the corporation across the street proposed removing 21 mature live oaks from this plaza, by most accounts to move a roost of grackles along with them. Arborists, the Texas Historic Tree Coalition and the mayor stopped it. Nineteen of the oaks are still here and the plan is not.
This is a grove rather than one tree: nineteen live oaks ringing a single fountain in a plaza of nine tenths of an acre. The fountain is the place to stand, and it puts several of them over your head at once. The largest trunk in the group runs to about eleven feet round; across the grove the trunks average roughly 30 inches through, from 21 up to 36. They reach about 50 feet. The tree coalition dates the present grove to a replanting in 1949 and 1950, which period photographs of the plaza confirm, so call them 75 years old.
Ferris Plaza itself is older and was the front door of Dallas, laid out under George Kessler's city plan directly opposite Union Station, a decade before Dealey Plaza existed two blocks away. It is named for Royal A. Ferris, who paid for the fountain. In 1965 more than 2,000 people assembled under these trees for a march led by the NAACP in support of the voting rights protests at Selma.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · 150 years · East Oak Cliff
Moore Park was created in 1938 as one of only five parks Dallas set aside for its Black residents, and renamed two years later, at a Juneteenth ceremony, for the civil rights leader Will Moore. The trees on the creek bank were there before either date.
About sixteen old trees stand on the south bank of Cedar Creek near its confluence with the Trinity, less than two miles from downtown. Mostly pecans, with a bur oak and a bois d'arc among them, though the sources disagree on the exact count and the mix. They disagree on the age too. The tree coalition's record from the designation day in November 2023 gives 155 to 190 years; its own text elsewhere on the same page says at least 150; a Texas conservation news site covering the same event reports at least 125 and possibly older. The honest span is roughly 125 to 190. The older end of that puts the grove here before John McClannahan Crockett, the second mayor of Dallas, bought the ground in 1869. The younger end does not.
The biggest trunk is given as somewhere between ten and fifteen and a half feet round, and the trees run 70 to 80 feet tall with crowns over 100 feet across. Walk in from East 8th Street and follow the creek; the pin marks the park, not a trunk.
Texas Red Oak (Quercus buckleyi) · 150 years · Great Trinity Forest / White Rock Heritage District
What stands today is not the original tree. Sometime after a Texas Historic Tree Coalition survey in 2002, this Texas red oak had already lost its main trunks to drought and ice, and what remains is regrowth sprouting from the stump, now barely 25 feet tall. The stump underneath is older: a trail chronicler who has walked this stretch of the Great Trinity Forest for years puts the base at hundreds of years old, probably one of the oldest living things in Dallas.
It grows on bare white limestone about a hundred feet from the Storytelling Place, a natural amphitheater where the Comanche told stories long before Dallas existed. A nonprofit called the White Rock Heritage District has been working with the Comanche Nation toward federal recognition of the site, which is a sign the ground is still tended rather than simply left to grow over.
Three other marked Comanche trees nearby have not had the same luck. One in Gateway Park, one on an escarpment ridge, one at a trail crossing: all three recorded dead within the last fifteen years, taken by heat, storms or age. This one is the one still standing, or what standing looks like when a tree survives as sprouts rather than as a trunk.
Nobody has confirmed its condition with a recent photograph. If you have walked to the Storytelling Place lately, tell us what you saw.
Pecan (Carya illinoinensis) · 150 years · Far Northwest Dallas / Elm Fork Trinity River Greenbelt
This pecan grew sideways on purpose, if the arborist who has studied it is right. Its trunk runs along the ground for about 25 feet before it turns and climbs, and Dallas arborist Steve Houser reads the scars on it as the marks of yucca rope: a flexible sapling, lashed down roughly 150 years ago so that it would point the way. That is what a Comanche marker tree is, a living signpost, bent young and left to grow into the shape of its instruction.
The name comes from California Crossing, a low-water ford on the Elm Fork of the Trinity River used by Native Americans, by early settlers and by travellers heading west in the 1849 Gold Rush. In 2013 the Comanche Nation Tribal Elder Council and the tribe's Language and Cultural Preservation Committee formally recognised the tree. Ten years later, on 25 October 2023, Dallas City Council named it among the city's first Historic Trees, which means nobody may remove it without the council's say.
Two live limbs rise from the bent trunk today, with signs of two more lost along the way. The measurements on record come from a 1997 survey: 43 feet tall, a crown 75 feet across, a trunk about 208 centimetres round. Those figures are 29 years old and the trunk has almost certainly kept growing, so if you have taped it more recently, tell us.
The armory next door is fenced off. The tree is not: it stands in the public park.
Bur Oak (Quercus macrocarpa) · The Cedars
The ground under this bur oak was a campsite while Texas was still its own country. The Dallas Morning News and the Texas Historic Tree Coalition both describe the spot that way: a place people camped in the years of the Republic of Texas, between 1836 and 1845, before the state joined the Union.
A generation later the land became Old City Park, established in 1876 as the first city park Dallas ever had. Today it is Dallas Heritage Village, twenty acres of living history laid out along paved paths, and the oak stands in the middle of it. The city grew up around the park, the park turned into a museum of the city's beginnings, and the tree stayed put through all of it.
On 25 October 2023 the City Council voted unanimously to give Dallas its first Historic Tree designations, six sites in all, and this oak is one of them. Under the city code it cannot now be removed without the council's authorisation.
Bur oaks carry the largest acorns of any North American oak, each sitting in a cup with a shaggy, fringed rim. Look down in autumn and you may find one.
What nobody has published is anything about this particular tree's size: no age, no girth, no height, and no word on whether it was already growing when those campers came through. If you have stood beside it with a tape measure, tell us.
Post Oak (Quercus stellata) · 200-260 years · Downtown Dallas / Convention Center District
The biggest oaks in this cemetery were already growing when the United States Constitution was signed in 1787, by the reckoning of the Texas Historic Tree Coalition and the Dallas Express. That puts the oldest somewhere around 250 years, a rough figure rather than a measured one: nobody has published a girth for any single trunk here.
They are post oaks, about 35 of them by the city's count and 40 by the coalition's, and they are among the last of the Post Oak Savanna left in any city, the open oak country that once ran from Oklahoma down into North Texas. Downtown Dallas covered the rest of it. This stand is on cemetery ground.
Pioneer Park Cemetery dates from 1849 and gathers what were once four burial grounds, the Masonic, the Odd Fellows', the Jewish and the City cemeteries, into about four acres. Many of Dallas's first settlers and founders are buried under these trees. The oldest oaks were here before any of them, and have since watched the city arrive, the towers go up and the convention centre settle in next door.
On 25 October 2023 the City Council made the grove one of Dallas's first Historic Tree designations, protecting the whole stand as a single entry rather than as 35 separate trunks. There is no named champion to hunt for. The point is to walk in among the headstones and stand under all of them at once, quietly, because these are family graves.