The Revolution Oak

This oak has a name, and nobody seems to know where it came from. Portland's heritage register places it at the south end of Willamette Park, beside the children's play area, and says only that it "is known as the Revolution Oak". We looked and found no page explaining which revolution, or whose. What the register does record is the tree. It is an Oregon white oak, the oak native to this part of the state, 104 feet tall, about 32 metres, with a crown 75 feet across and a trunk 4.48 metres round. The city designated it a heritage tree in 1998, and somebody photographed it at the spot in April 2026. The species matters in Portland. The Corbett Oak, about 2.7 kilometres north in Heritage Tree Park, is an Oregon white oak too, and the neighbours who stopped a chainsaw partway through it are credited with the 1993 ordinance under which this one is protected. Of the two, the Corbett Oak has the dated age and the famous rescue. This one has the better name and no explanation for it. Its age is not recorded either, because the register has no field for it. So there are two open questions on one trunk. If you know either answer, a family story, an old newspaper piece, a sign in the park, tell us. A name like this deserves its reason.