History

A Good Life Lived
Beyond the controversy and finger-pointing, the decline of the Arsenal Oak provides a chance to ponder the past from the point of view of the venerable old tree.

by David Foster

There is a candor from the experts you don't really expect. What you expect is a placebo for the soul, a bit of indirect bad news buttressed with a highly qualified, "but maybe not." The answer you get is anything but that. If you were the patient and they were the physicians it would be a very brutal prognosis. Come a year, maybe more, maybe less, with pretty good luck and as long as nothing else goes wrong, which isn't likely, you're going to be dead.

This "patient" isn't a human being or any other kind of animal. It is a massive white oak and a very old tree. Betting men would easily wager a sawbuck that it is the oldest tree in Augusta, the Arsenal Oak, much beloved symbol of Augusta State University, its likeness adorning the university's official images.

The age of the Arsenal Oak, like that of many Southerners born before 1900 and virtually all of them born before 1800, is almost impossible to pinpoint. Best guesses, depending on your knowledge of trees, love for romance and desire for superlatives, is somewhere between 200 and 400 years.

And how long may a white oak (quercus alba) expect to live should it draw the winning lottery ticket for longest life? Experts say somewhere between 400 and 1,000 years. So the Arsenal Oak, though it has been hit with the tree version of a normally fatal cancer (hypoxylon canker, a fungus) is either less than middle aged or ready to succumb to the bedevilments of old age, helped along a decade or two by the recent drought.

There is some finger-pointing among the local arborists, college officials and tree huggers as to why the tree got sick and what should be done about it. Into the human controversy swirling about this sad story walks the lone history writer. Note here I wrote "history writer," not "natural history writer."

All historians like a good concrete date on which to begin a story. Well, there isn't one for the Arsenal Oak. At some time way the heck back it sprung from an acorn that fell by chance to the forest floor right where it stands today (if you subscribe to 250-plus) or was moved as a sprout or sapling (200-250 years ago) by an early settler.

Arborist Roy Simkins, principal of Simkins Land Company, suggests the latter dates, closer to 200 years, no more than 250. He also subscribes to the theory that the oak was most likely planted as a landscape addition, not a sprout growing wild in a forest. He points to the way the trunk stops at about 15 feet from the ground and then spreads into multiple branches.

"Had that tree been part of a mature forest, its trunk would have stretched much further, like the ones you see in the old forests down in the river swamps. Since it didn't have to stretch for sunlight it had no need to adapt the long trunk and the branches began to spread much sooner. That indicates to me it was planted in a fairly open area or, if it did come up wild, it might have germinated at the side of a field," Simkins says.

Henry Frischknecht, owner of Empire Tree and Turf in Augusta, is the expert charged with trying to save the tree. He doesn't exactly agree with Simkins, though he does point out that when one casts his eye that far back in time theory tends to refract like light through a cheap lens. Even so, "it could have sprouted wild in a forest (that stood where the tree is today). The trunk could have been affected by any number of things, like being broken while still a sapling," Frischknecht says. He also says an ice accumulation, a person blazing a trail, or who knows what all could have broken the trunk arresting its upward growth leaving the branches to make their way to the sunlight in the overarching canopy of the forest."

For the historian, as opposed to the natural historian, 200-250 years is much easier to work with since men did on a regular basis during that time come into contact with the tree. Before 1750 however the tree would have stood within blown leaf distance of the Lower Trading Road to the Creek Nation, an important throughway for Native Americans and European traders. It is doubtful anybody would have paid it much attention. Well, maybe one person did. The anonymous passerby who broke the trunk of a small oak sapling as a message to those following that said "this is the way." That would explain the low trunk, according to Frischknecht's theory, and, if it's true, adds a whole other dimension to the tree's possible connection to CSRA human history. It would certainly sound good at the eulogy.

But for all the finger pointing surrounding the tree's generally accepted eminent demise and who was responsible for the canker that is eating it alive, the greater truth is this old tree has already lived through more life-threatening situations than many generations of humans could and that includes those folks trying to kill themselves.

Like all white oaks, life for the Arsenal Oak began as an acorn. Whether that acorn germinated where the oak stands or germinated somewhere else and was moved there as a sprout or sapling by human hands, it survived one chance in, oh, about a million to ever reach a height big enough for a passerby to break off a piece of its trunk.

White oaks, highly valued for their rich, dense white wood, especially for flooring, premium-printing papers and, historically, for barrel staves (the white oak is also known as the "stave oak"), tend to yield very large acorns once every three to five years. In good years, one tree can produce hundreds of thousands of acorns (called "mast"). On the east coast, both Native Americans and European settlers used these acorns as food, though the meats were highly susceptible to weevils and didn't store well. To become trees, and this would be bad news for the vast majority of acorns, they had to be buried to germinate.

The primary buriers of white oak acorns are gray squirrels. During acorn bearing time the squirrels consume many of the acorns, but are instinctively programmed to bury those they do not eat. They don't remember where they buried them, they just seem to know there are many buried somewhere near the parent tree and during the winter scratch around in the leaves to find this reserve. Many are not found. The Arsenal Oak could have been one of those.

During the 1750s, just as today, the white-tailed deer herds in Georgia were huge (in 1750, half a million deer hides were shipped out of Augusta to Europe; it was very big business). When the acorns sprouted in the spring, the wee oak trees were (and are) prime browse for the winter-hungry deer. But one nipping or even 10 wouldn't kill the sprout. It would just make another wee trunk and keep on growing toward the sun until one year it got too large to be of interest to the deer. If it didn't make this transition within 10 or so years, the roots died and that was the end of that. However, should a little tree get four or five feet high and a deer nipped off its crown grazing on new leaves, that could create a stunted trunk and, voila, another opportunity for the tree to blossom branches as did the Arsenal Oak.

One might determine, however, that regardless of the forest in which the oak was born, it did grow to maturity around very little competition as its branches reach as much as 90 feet out from the trunk in almost every direction. From a tree point of view, that is just how things have happened since the current deciduous forests cropped up in our neck of the woods some 100,000 years ago. But for people living in Augusta in 1750, a tree in the front or side yard with such splendidly spreading branches offered a highly valuable commodity beyond its mere beauty and wood, shade. Lots of shade.

From at least 1736 on, the land on which the Arsenal Oak stands belonged to somebody (as far as we know the Native Americans did not own land individually). And while Augusta, then a long four miles down the way, was a deer hide trading capital, the colonial government was working hard to have the hinterlands settled and farmed. Trees, while highly valued today for their aesthetics, were more highly prized for building materials and firewood. Since the few people who settled the area didn't need such an abundance of building materials or firewood, but did need tillable land, most trees were simply cut down, their roots dug up and the whole harvest burned. So common were these fires when a new area was settled, the smoke was often referred to as "the fog," and the fog hung about for years, for so long, in fact, that the haze was just considered part of the natural order of things.

So many trees were cut down for farms, people believed squirrels (suddenly left homeless by the massive land clearings) were migratory, like the passenger pigeon, and, analogous to the Utah locusts, these migrating squirrels could destroy a cornfield in mere hours. Controlling these pests actually contributed to one of the great advancements in firearm accuracy, the invention of the patched ball, smaller calibers and more accuracy. Thus was born the famous "squirrel rifle" that bit the British so hard at Lexington and Concord.

By the turn of the 19th century, the countryside on the Hill had seen those days pass, and the great forests of the 1730s had become vast cotton and cornfields. Somehow the Arsenal Oak, by then a large, seemingly mature 50-year-old, had survived it all and shade cannot be discounted as one of the reasons why.

Pretty is another one. As you make a turn around the drive in front of the old administration buildings, which were also administration buildings and officer residences when the campus was the United States Arsenal, you will see that the Arsenal Oak lies almost directly in front of the middle building. Today the tree is shielded by a collection of much younger trees, but from 1829 until at least the turn of the century that area was more like a lawn. Several old prints show various military companies drilling on it with the buildings in the background. If it were a lawn, then the military commanders might have liked the view of the spreading oak with the stunted trunk, and the soldiers, without doubt, would have enjoyed its shade.

Legend has it that the old oak was also a popular place for sparking (that's courting for you younger folks) and dreaming. The author Steven Vincent Benet, it is said, often sat under it to write when his father was commander of the arsenal.

In January 1861, the oak was witness, though it certainly didn't care, to the surrender of the arsenal to Georgia troops, one of the earliest military actions leading to the formal outbreak of the Civil War.

As I walked around the old oak last summer, I got a little twinge of sympathy myself thinking on how much good luck this old timer has had and how sad that luck was running out. In addition to nibbling deer, voracious squirrels, god knows how many lightening strikes, ice storms, droughts and diseases it has survived. Just to stand here through so many turnings of the seasons is a remarkable feat and testimony to every living thing's will to survive.

But even the strongest living thing can stand only so many punches. The five-year drought, and drought may be the biggest single enemy of the mature oak, was hard on the old tree, most likely fatally so as it weakened the tree's nourishment system and created a host for the deadly canker. Now it is being attacked by a host of other dangers, such as borers.

But I wouldn't let my mind dwell on that. Like sitting in a pew at a funeral, it is best to think on a good life lived than the death that brought you there. No other living thing in Augusta witnessed the passing of the Native Americans and the settling of the Europeans. No other living thing in Augusta has so many scars from battles well fought, and for the Arsenal Oak, fight was its only option as flee was never one.

There is quite a history lesson in that folks, not to mention a morality tale or two. Take a walk by the Arsenal Oak one day and ponder on its age and then on the squirrel's nest that sits halfway up on one of the main branches. This is where new life began in this ancient old tree. These are the critters that might bury one acorn that will sprout anew, continuing nature's cycle of life. Perhaps an ancestor of these very squirrels buried the acorn that sprouted this wonderful tree.

There is a scheme afoot to clone the oak, but somehow that doesn't have the romantic impact of another squirrel planting one of its acorns, if it ever bears any more. The oak is as old as recorded time in the CSRA and its acorns as new as this year. For the poet, arborist and tree hugger that should be cloning enough.