The Pioneers Rest Texas Ash

Fort Worth pays to keep this one tree alive. In 2019 the city had the Texas Ash in Pioneers Rest Cemetery professionally injected against the emerald ash borer, the beetle that has been erasing ash trees across North America, with a commitment to come back and repeat the treatment every two or three years. That is an unusual amount of attention for a single ash, and it is the regional champion of its species, 213 centimetres round. It grows in the oldest burial ground in the city, on Samuels Avenue, just over a kilometre northeast of downtown and walkable from it, among Fort Worth's earliest graves. The cemetery went onto the National Register of Historic Places in 2021. The ash stands over the kind of ground where the city's own beginning is written on the stones, and it is being kept going against a pest that has already killed hundreds of millions of its relatives. Proof of life here is better than most: the Texas Big Tree Registry put a tape around this exact trunk in December 2025. Its age is unrecorded, and there is no growth figure for Texas ash we trust enough to work backwards from, so we leave it open rather than invent one. The main gate is sometimes locked. There is a public entrance at the south end of the west fence, and daylight is the sensible time to go.