The Moore Park Big Tree Grove

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.