The Treaty Oak
Austin, Texas, United States
A five-hundred-year-old live oak in Austin, the last survivor of the Council Oaks grove where tradition holds Tejas leaders met Stephen F. Austin, and the object of one of the most public acts of tree-devotion in American history.
The Treaty Oak stands on Baylor Street a few blocks from the river, a live oak estimated at five hundred years old and the last of the Council Oaks, a grove where, in the story Texas has told itself for two centuries, Tejas leaders of the Tonkawa and Comanche met Stephen F. Austin under its shade to negotiate. Historicity of the treaty itself is contested; the tree's age and its place as a meeting ground are not.
In 1989 a vandal poisoned it with herbicide and the city responded with an act of collective devotion: arborists removed most of the crown, replanted, dug protective soil treatments, and Austinites held vigils and children wrote letters to a tree. It survived, scarred and smaller, and the possibility that it was a poisoning rather than a murder that kept Austin up at night says a great deal about what the tree means. Its descendants, grown from its acorns, are planted across the city.
Visiting
The tree is in a small city park at 501 Baylor St, open daily with a viewing fence and interpretive panels. See the City of Austin page.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:TreatyOak.jpeg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories