Lauren Larson is one of the neighbors trying to save this 300-year-old oak. "They're going to destroy the tree for a road connected to a bridge that will be built who knows when," she said.
Three hundred years ago, about the time Daniel Boone's father was born, a bur oak acorn sprouted on a piece of high ground on what would become the south side of a city named Lexington.
There was no Commonwealth of Kentucky when bison and elk browsed around the young sapling. No zoning ordinances when a pioneer cleared other trees 200 years ago, but spared the oak because it was producing acorns of its own that were good feed for livestock.
Now the big oak, which has survived fires, storms, droughts and axes, is facing destruction because it is in the way of townhouses and a road — and a city development plan that did not take the tree into consideration.
If it is destroyed, the loss will be another blow to what experts say is a rapidly disappearing landscape that once defined the Bluegrass region.
Hundreds of large, spreading bur oaks — and similar numbers of chinquapin oaks and blue ashes — once dotted the Fayette County countryside. Only a relative handful remain.
There's
more
Friends of the Historic South Elkhorn Area Bur Oak Tree can be reached at buroak300 at yahoo dot com
"People should be jumping up and down and saying 'We have to save these trees.'"
UPDATE August 29, 2008:
300-year-old tree gets temporary reprieve
Lauren Larson is one of the neighbors trying to save this 300-year-old oak. "They're going to destroy the tree for a road connected to a bridge that will be built who knows when," she said.
Does anyone remember Claudine Longet? I had a friend who for all I know is still going through at 1960s-1970s French pop phase and introduced me to her. All I really remember is the harpsichord of L'Amour Est Bleu and that she killed someone. And that the song was eventually recorded without vocals for a Stormy Night recording.
Here at the LPL, you must pass the desk from the elevator to the stacks, and many times people will come up to the desk rather than trying to attempt the stacks themselves. I'm ok with this, but please when you come to the desk, say, "Can you help me find this?" Or even, "Will you find this book for me?" I'm even ok with you leaving off the polite bit at the beginning because this is Kentucky, and although LPL is downtown, I expect most of the patron's here to be rude (urban) rednecks without a polite bone in their bodies.
Did you know that in nineteenth-century America, politics was the entertainment that more than filled in for both television and movies? It was the equivalent of all the college and professional sports teams added together - people listened to politicians giving loooong speeches as though...as though their lives depended on it. It was considered better than the zoo, better than the circus, better than the Fright Night Lights. And it wasn't about who won or lost, it was about how your life would turn out. Americans understood that; they knew their decision mattered.
