The Toomer's Oaks
Auburn, Alabama, United States
Live oaks at Toomer's Corner in Auburn whose toilet-paper rolling after victories is one of college sport's oldest living rituals, poisoned in 2010 and carried on by their propagated descendants.
For over fifty years, whenever Auburn University won, fans rolled the great oaks at Toomer's Corner in toilet paper, a rite so established that it defines the intersection. In 2010 a rival fan poisoned the trees and the city grieved them publicly; they were removed in 2013 after long efforts to save them. Auburn's horticulturists had preserved tissue and seedlings, and two oaks propagated from the originals, nicknamed "the chosen ones," were replanted at the corner; the rolling resumed when they were judged sturdy enough to survive it.
The episode is an unusually well-documented case of a tree functioning as a civic sacrament: the outrage at the poisoning, the funerals-in-reverse of the removal, the replanting treated as resurrection. Ritual, community identity, and a living organism held together as one thing.
Visiting
Toomer's Corner is the intersection of College St and Magnolia Ave in downtown Auburn; the oaks are on the sidewalk corners, public at all hours.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Toomer%27s_Oaks.jpg), CC BY.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories