Mobile's best-known tree comes with a hanging. Charles Boyington, a printer executed on 20 February 1835 for the murder of Nathaniel Frost, swore an oak would grow from his heart to prove his innocence, and the live oak by the Church Street Graveyard is the one the city has pointed to ever since. The cemetery wall was moved back after 1900, so the Boyington Oak now stands outside it on Bayou Street, free to see, with its own festival every May.
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Southern Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) · Church Street Graveyard, Mobile
Charles Boyington swore an oak would grow from his heart to prove he was innocent. He was hanged in Mobile on 20 February 1835, and there is an oak.
Boyington was a printer, convicted of murdering Nathaniel Frost the year before. He was buried in the potter's field corner of the Church Street Graveyard, and by the story Mobile has told ever since, the live oak that grew there is the one he promised. Nobody has dated the tree with a ring count, and no age for it is on the record we could check, so the legend is doing the dating here. That is worth saying plainly: the oak and the hanging are both real, and the link between them is folklore.
Mobile has embraced it anyway. When the cemetery wall was moved back after 1900, the tree ended up on the outside, so today it stands at the edge of Bayou Street, free to see at any hour from the public pavement. In May 2025 Mobile held its sixth annual Boyington Oak Festival, with a trolley ride out to the tree, and a local station reported it still standing almost 200 years after the execution. Ghost stories come with it.
The graveyard itself runs free walking tours from its Scott Street gate. If you know how old the oak really is, tell us.
Photo: Altairisfar (CC BY-SA 3.0)