Historical Name: Booker T. Washington
Common Name: White Oak
Latin Name: Quercus alba
Booker Washington was born in 1856 to Jane Ferguson, a slave and cook on the James Burroughs plantation in Hardy, Virginia. At age 9, Booker was among the group gathered beneath the trees in a local park, and first learned of his new freedom when the Emancipation Proclamation was read. After emancipation, the family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where Booker worked at a salt furnace and in coal mines. As an adult he gained national prominence in the field of education and as an author. He founded the Tuskegee Institute in 1881 and promoted education as the means of social integration of Blacks. In 1908, he made a nostalgic visit to the site where he first learned of his freedom. A sense of urgency to preserve the trees was heightened by the severe winter of 1994, during which time the park lost one of a pair of 200-year old white oaks. The last remaining white oak still stands as a witness to Dr. Washington’s boyhood days. This tree grew from an acorn taken from the Booker T. Washington White Oak, and was planted into UCNJ’s Historic Tree Grove in 1997.
(text adapted from American Forests)