Trust has worked to save centuries-old live oak for decades
At Eutaw Springs, South Carolina, a live oak that historians believe has stood for roughly 245 years is now being choked by the chains and cables meant to keep it alive. Preservationists are working to save the centuries-old tree, which stands near a Revolutionary War-era crossroad where British soldiers were encamped late in the conflict.
After multiple attempts over the decades to stave off the tree’s death, the hardware installed to keep the oak upright is now the cause of its decline. Garrison Marcoux, a historian with the South Carolina Battlefield Preservation Trust, spoke about the preservation work as workers clambered among the tree’s limbs.
“I’m a spiritual person,” Marcoux said. “To say that a place that experienced a lot of violence and intense emotion and things like that doesn’t hold some kind of energy is probably not likely. I think that energy exists where something like this happened.”
The oak is classified as a “witness tree,” which reporting describes as a unique, living reminder of an oft-overshadowed chapter in U.S. history.
The location places the oak at a South Carolina crossroad where American Maj. Gen. Nathanael Greene waged his “war of posts” — a series of attacks — against British forces near the end of the Revolutionary War. The Continental Army pressed the British positions, and it is possible that soldiers sat in the oak’s shade to recuperate, took cover behind its then-slender trunk, or fell beneath its canopy as the conflict reached its close. The tree has survived to the present.
The current preservation push amounts to the tree’s own fight for survival.