The Treaty Oak of Jacksonville
Jacksonville, Florida, United States
A two-hundred-fifty-year-old live oak in Jesse Ball DuPont Park, saved for the city in 1932 by schoolchildren who raised the money to buy the land beneath it.
Jacksonville's Treaty Oak is a giant southern live oak in a downtown park, its branches spreading more than a hundred feet, held up in places on wooden props like an old cathedral roof. The "treaty" story, that it shaded a signing between pioneers and Seminoles, is folk-apocryphal; what is real is a century of civic ceremony. In 1932, when developers planned the block, schoolchildren across the city collected coins to buy the land, and the tree became a public trust by way of the smallest donors.
The park holds weddings, graduation photographs, and quiet visits year round, and the tree's own legend has accreted the way urban trees do: lovers' oaths, ghost stories, a Druidic ordination joke played on journalists in the 1930s that locals still tell. It is one of the great American civic trees, sacred in the register cities keep.
Visiting
Jesse Ball DuPont Park, 1123 Prudential Dr, Jacksonville; open daily, free. City of Jacksonville parks carries details.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jax_FL_Treaty_Oak01.jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories