White Oak

Quercus alba

White oak is eastern North America's slow, wide-crowned oak, tougher and longer-lived than red oak. We map 11 of them, in 10 cities.

The oldest, on the edge of Old Logan Cemetery in Ohio, is put at roughly six hundred years; the town sells saplings raised from its acorns to keep the line going. In Baltimore the Ruxton Liberty Tree was a seedling around 1646 and marked a boundary between two land grants by 1694; the family whose lawn it stands on pays for 5,000 gallons of water a week to keep it alive. At Gettysburg, the Devil's Den witness tree was a sapling when Longstreet's assault opened around it in July 1863. Boston's grows wild on the Arnold Arboretum's Peters Hill, uncatalogued until 2010 and cored in 2018 to roughly two centuries old. Athens, Georgia's is the son of an oak an 1890 newspaper story said legally owned itself.

Chicago

The White Oak of Red Gate Woods

Red Gate Woods

The champion white oak of the Forest Preserves of Cook County is not the thickest white oak they have measured.

The White Oak of McClaughrey Springs Woods

McClaughrey Springs Woods

This white oak is 4.76 metres round at chest height, more than half a metre thicker than the county's champion white oak, and it still ranks second.

Boston

The Peters Hill White Oak

195-220 years · Peters Hill, Arnold Arboretum, Jamaica Plain

Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has been cataloguing plants since 1872 and did not get round to this one until 2010.

Washington DC

Travilah Oak

330 years · Travilah, Potomac (Montgomery County, MD)

A white oak that by one estimate is older than the United States stands in the forecourt of a suburban shopping centre, behind its own fence, under its own floodlights and its own lightning rods.