The Kile Oak

Mae Kile would not sell her house to anybody who refused to promise to keep the oak. She campaigned for it from 1926 until her death, and from 1928 she kept a guestbook, which filled with signatures from other countries. People travelled to a residential street in Irvington to look at a tree in somebody's yard, and signed the book on their way out. Her father, Rev. Oliver W. Kile, a retired Ohio evangelist and Civil War veteran, had bought the lot in 1901. The oak was older than the state he bought it in. The Irvington Historical Society, which took over the property in 1973 and still keeps it, records 190 inches around the trunk, 483 centimetres, 87 feet tall, with a crown spreading 122 feet: the largest bur oak in any metropolitan city in Indiana, and sixth largest anywhere in the state. The Society puts its age at 300 to 400 years and other accounts widen that to 300 to 500. Nobody has narrowed it. In October 1976 it was named a Bicentennial Tree of the Year and described as a living witness of the American Revolutionary period, which on either band it is. Two bronze plaques, 1973 and 1976, sit at its foot. The remnants of Hurricane Helene came through in September 2024 and hurt it. The broken limbs were taken off and the lot opened again.