The Bur Oak at Big Spring

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.