Maryland built a state park around a single tree and then lost it in one afternoon. The Wye Oak was the largest known white oak in the United States, believed to be over 460 years old, and the state tree of Maryland for more than sixty years. A severe thunderstorm destroyed it on 6 June 2002. It had been copied just in time. Frank Gouin, a horticulture professor at the University of Maryland, led an effort to clone the tree by grafting, partly for its size and age and partly because it shrugged off oak wilt and gypsy moth in a way other white oaks did not. Two of those grafts went into the ground at Mount Vernon on 26 April 2002, six weeks before the storm. A genetic clone was planted here on 6 June 2006, four years to the day after the fall, on the old site and near the remains of the original trunk. So what stands in the park is not a big tree. It is the same tree, genetically, in the same place, about twenty years into a life its parent ran for four and a half centuries. It was photographed alive and growing here in July 2025. Come for that rather than for the girth.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Wye Oak State Park, Wye Mills, Talbot County, MarylandYou can recognise it as the young oak planted in 2006 beside the remains of its parent's fallen trunk. It stands on the original site in Wye Oak State Park.
Free to our knowledge (the state park page lists no fee). Wye Oak State Park, Maryland DNR, is open sunrise to sunset daily; a pavilion shows a section of the original trunk and marks where the old tree stood.
Wye Oak State Park, Wye Mills, Talbot County, Maryland. About 100 km from Washington DC (our nearest published city), well over an hour's drive, too far for a day-trip extension.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.