The Watson Beech

Portland State University knocked down a Victorian mansion to build its library, then laid out the front lawn around the tree that had stood beside it. The beech is still there. The house is not. Frank Watson made his money in ironworks and shipbuilding, and around 1890 he and his wife Mary Whalley Watson planted this copper beech beside their new home on the corner of Hall and Park. Sources credit the planting to one or the other of them and do not agree on which. The house came down between 1965 and 1968 to make room for the Millar Library, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. No record explains why the beech was spared when everything around it was cleared. It simply was, and it ended up the centrepiece of the lawn rather than a casualty of it. It now stands about 25.6 metres tall with a trunk 5.71 metres around, and went onto Portland's register as Heritage Tree #54 in 1995. A photograph from 1975 shows students packed shoulder to shoulder on the grass underneath it, which is more or less what the lawn is still for on a warm day. What it has watched is a residential corner turning into a university: Victorian houses giving way to concrete, and then fifty years of students using its shade as somewhere to meet.