Pausing Beside the King's Highway

The trees covering the hills outside Beijing, China, are mostly small and scraggly—a result of many centuries of timbering. But high up in the hills is an ancient Buddhist temple which is even older than those early tree-cutting endeavors. Surrounding the shrines and courtyards of the temple are towering, majestic trees that have been protected from the saw by the local populace’s respect for the temple. One of the trees is taller and larger than the rest.

It is huge and said to be well over a thousand years old. The tree was visited regularly by Chinese royalty on day trips from their palace in Beijing’s Forbidden City. This grandest of trees also has a name: The Emperor of Trees. You gotta love trees that have survived for hundreds of years and grown huge while anchored to one lucky spot on this earth.

And more impressive still are the trees so grand that they have been given names. Like the Angel Oak on John’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a massive live oak, 65 feet tall, 25.5 feet in circumference and providing 17,000 square feet of shade. Some of its large branches extend over 80 feet from the trunk.

The tree is thought to be 1,400 years old. I visited the Angel Oak in the late 1980s or early 1990s and remember having to look through gaps in a fence that surrounded the tree. At that time the tree was privately owned and had been closed to the public. But I understand that the tree is now accessible in the City of Charleston’s Angel Oak Park.

I’ve also visited Oregon’s largest tree. Near Seaside, Oregon, just off Highway 26, is the largest Sitka Spruce in the continental United States. 216 feet tall and 750 years old, this tree is very, very big. How it escaped the loggers’ clearcuts that dominate coastal Oregon is a wonder. And of course most North Carolinians are familiar with the Davie Poplar—the grand tree in the center of McCorkle Place near the Old Well on the campus of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Tradition holds that in 1792 William R. Davie stood beneath the tree (or thrust a poplar branch into the ground) and declared that that would be the site for the new University. Although the tree is now full of cement and held up by cables, its progeny, a Davie Poplar Jr., was planted nearby in 1918. And then there is another special North Carolina tree which endures only several feet from the cars and trucks whizzing by on the blacktop of a highway in Pender County.

In the late 1700s the road between New Bern and Wilmington was sandy and primitive. It was known as the King’s Highway and it would eventually be improved and renamed as Highway 17. One who traveled the King’s Highway in 1791 described the route as follows: “The whole Road from Newbern to Wilmington (except in a few places of small extent) passes through the most barren country I ever beheld; especially in the parts nearest to the latter; which is no other than a bed of white sand.” The traveler was the President of the United States, George Washington. Washington was in the midst of his Southern Tour—a loop through Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia, designed to help the President discover “the temper and disposition of the inhabitants towards the new government.” Washington would visit New Bern, Wilmington, Charleston, Savannah, Augusta, Columbia, Charlotte, Salisbury, and Salem, on this nineteen hundred mile tour.

For the most part, Washington traveled in a “magnificent” white carriage pulled by four horses, with designs of the four seasons and the Washington coat of arms painted on the sides. Washington called it his “chariot.” It is said that upon approaching a town, where the inhabitants would generally turn out en masse to cheer the President, the 59 year old Washington would exit the carriage and mount his handsome stallion, Prescott, for a carefully choreographed entrance. Washington’s traveling companions numbered only five other persons, although the locals would often accompany him for lengthy stretches after leaving a settlement.

On April 23 or 24, 1791, Washington was nearing Wilmington, North Carolina, when his entourage stopped to rest in the shade of a large oak that stood next to the King’s Highway. That tree, the Washington Oak, still shades travelers on Highway 17—although today’s travelers are all zipping by in automobiles at thirty-five miles an hour and care little for the shade. The Washington Oak is not well marked but if you are looking carefully it’s size and immense branches are easy to spot. It is just south of Hampstead on the west side of Highway 17, several hundred yards south of the intersection with State Road 210.

If you choose to rest under the tree you will know it is the right tree if you see a stone marker next to the massive trunk placed by the D.A.R. with a plaque that commemorates Washington’s stop to rest beneath the branches of the Washington Oak.