The Line-of-Sight Oak

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.