The Suicide Oak

The name is the reason most people come and it is worth stating plainly: sixteen men took their own lives under this tree over about twelve years, from the 1890s into the 1900s, when this corner of the park was a quiet distance from the city. The newspapers named it and the name stuck. What you stand in front of is one of three named survivors of the forest that covered this ground before New Orleans existed, the others being the McDonogh Oak and the Anseman Oak a few hundred metres south. One low branch does the thing live oaks do when nobody prunes them. It leaves the trunk, bends the whole way down to the grass, frames the walkway and rises again on the far side. Two giant limbs came off in the 1980s and one of them still lies underneath. Nobody publishes an age for this one. The accounts that group it with the McDonogh and the Anseman put those two somewhere between seven and nine hundred years, and we have found no measurement of this trunk at all, so the honest answer is that it is old and undated. If you know a girth figure, or a survey that covers it, tell us and it goes on the page.