The Grassy Knoll Oak

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.