The Kissing Tree

Herman Strack landed at Galveston in 1848, a blacksmith out of Prussia and the first of five brothers to settle north Harris County. Family records put his homestead and forge at this tree. It got its name from what happened under it afterwards: couples met here, and a good number of proposals were made in its shade. Everything else the Stracks built is gone. When the family restaurant closed in 2014 a developer bought the land for a Circle K, and the tree stood where the forecourt entrance needed to be. That was very nearly the end of it. Students at Klein Oaks High School ran a letter-writing campaign, Circle K eventually pledged to keep the tree, and three years later the Texas A&M Forest Service made it a Famous Tree of Texas. So it is a live oak hung with Spanish moss on a patch of grass behind a filling station, and it is the last physical trace of a settlement that gave the whole district its name. Nobody has dated it. It was already the tree everyone met at in 1848, which puts a floor under the number if not a ceiling.