The Post Oak Grove of Pioneer Park Cemetery

The biggest oaks in this cemetery were already growing when the United States Constitution was signed in 1787, by the reckoning of the Texas Historic Tree Coalition and the Dallas Express. That puts the oldest somewhere around 250 years, a rough figure rather than a measured one: nobody has published a girth for any single trunk here. They are post oaks, about 35 of them by the city's count and 40 by the coalition's, and they are among the last of the Post Oak Savanna left in any city, the open oak country that once ran from Oklahoma down into North Texas. Downtown Dallas covered the rest of it. This stand is on cemetery ground. Pioneer Park Cemetery dates from 1849 and gathers what were once four burial grounds, the Masonic, the Odd Fellows', the Jewish and the City cemeteries, into about four acres. Many of Dallas's first settlers and founders are buried under these trees. The oldest oaks were here before any of them, and have since watched the city arrive, the towers go up and the convention centre settle in next door. On 25 October 2023 the City Council made the grove one of Dallas's first Historic Tree designations, protecting the whole stand as a single entry rather than as 35 separate trunks. There is no named champion to hunt for. The point is to walk in among the headstones and stand under all of them at once, quietly, because these are family graves.