When the fighting at Devil's Den began on 2 July 1863, this white oak was a sapling, its trunk about 21 centimetres across. It is a witness to the battle, but a young one, and its interest is what it looked down on rather than its age. What it looked down on was the opening clash of Longstreet's assault on the second day. From this high ground there is what both our sources call a balcony view: Houck's Ridge, the Slaughter Pen and the western slope of Little Round Top, the ground where about 2,400 Union troops under Birney met some 5,500 Confederates under Hood. The evidence that it was already here is a photograph published in 1899, showing the tree established on this same spot. The survey behind gettysburgwitnesstrees.com measured it in 2023 at 411 centimetres round, more than five times its width in 1863. By the estimates in the same sources it is somewhere around 175 to 200 years old, which puts its seedling years a generation or so before the battle. So the view is the thing, and the tree frames it. Stand beside the trunk, look out over Devil's Den, and you are looking at the same ground this oak has faced since before a shot was fired there. It stands on a sharp curve of Sickles Avenue, across the road from the monument to Smith's 4th New York Independent Battery. Free, and a few steps from the car.
Sickles Avenue, above Devil's Den, Gettysburg National Military Park, Pennsylvania You can recognise it by the white oak trunk, 411 cm round, on the high ground with a clear view down over Devil's Den. It stands on a sharp curve of Sickles Avenue, across from the Smith's 4th New York Battery monument.
Free, within Gettysburg National Military Park; on public land directly beside Sickles Avenue overlooking Devil's Den, reachable on foot.
No public transit; short drive from downtown Gettysburg, PA. Roadside parking nearby.