The Centennial Tree

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.