What is the oldest tree in Hampton, Virginia?
The oldest tree in Hampton is the Emancipation Oak, a southern live oak on the Hampton University campus near the corner of East Queen Street and Tyler Street, estimated at somewhere between 200 and 300 years. The estimates disagree badly: older material says 150 to 200 years, a 2023 figure says about 250, a 2022 report says 309, and nobody has cored the tree to settle it, deliberately, because taking a core from an old live oak for the sake of a number is a poor trade. In September 1863 the Black community of the Virginia Peninsula gathered beneath it for the first public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation in the South. Its canopy spreads about 98 feet on a trunk about 50 feet tall. The campus grounds are open and free.
The Emancipation Oak stands on the Hampton University campus near the corner of East Queen Street and Tyler Street, on open ground with no fence, no ticket and no restriction on walking up to it. The campus is a National Historic Landmark district, listed on the National Register in November 1969, and this tree is part of what earned it that. Hampton sits on the Virginia Peninsula and the campus is straightforward to reach by car from I-64, with parking nearby. Mary Peake taught free and enslaved Black children to read beneath these branches when Virginia law forbade it. In September 1863 the community gathered here for the first Southern public reading of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the university still holds ceremonies under the tree. What you see is a southern live oak doing what live oaks do with space, spreading a canopy about 98 feet across on a trunk barely 50 feet tall. It is evergreen, so no season is better than another. National Geographic once listed it among ten great trees of the world.
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