Carya illinoinensis After General Andrew Jackson’s victory over the British at the Battle of New Orleans on January 8, 1815, some of his soldiers returned to their homes in Tennessee over the Natchez Trace. Originally a forest path, the five-hundred-mile road, first...
Platanus occidentalis This American sycamore was the starting point for Colonel James Robertson’s 1785 survey of West Tennessee with Henry Rutherford and Edward Harris. Rutherford carved his initials “H.R.” in the tree, which sat on a high bluff overlooking the Forked...
Although fighting duels was illegal in the State of Tennessee by the early nineteenth century, the Dueling Oaks of Memphis reigned over skirmishes of honor as late as 1870. The oak grove earned its name from its location almost into Mississippi, where dueling was...
Taxodium distichum Once reportedly the oldest and largest tree east of the Rocky Mountains, this giant of a cypress sprouted out of the Obion River bottomland in West Tennessee some five hundred years before Columbus sailed for America. The Big Cypress of Weakley...
Thomas Bigfoot Spencer, described as a mountain of a man weighing three hundred pounds who left footprints the size of a giant, is credited as being the first Caucasian to settle in Sumner County in what was then North Carolina, nearly two decades before Tennessee...
