West Beach White Oak

With consideration to Union’s long standing history, the campus has its fair share of old and large trees. One such tree is the West Beach White Oak tree. This tree, located between the West and Richmond dormitories, is one of the largest well known trees on campus. As estimated by Joseph Conti, the Union College Arborist, this tree began to grow around 1700 making it nearly 300 years old. Besides this, there is very little information about this tree, therefore leaving its history on campus a mystery.

The mystery of this tree is only deepened by two important maps from the Schafer Library’s Special Collections. The first map was created by The United Tree Service in 1952. On this map you can see what might be a White Oak tree marked with a triangle and a red dot. This red dot stands out as it signifies that at the time the tree was in a bad condition. What is interesting about this is that the second map, created by an architecture company in 1967, does not show any mention of this tree. This leads to the question: where did the tree go and why was the tree shown in the original 1952 map. Having a deep mystery would be interesting, although this is likely not the case. Due to the purposes of each map, the 1967 map likely omitted this tree as it was not relevant to their architecture and engineering goals and since it would have been right on the border of two of their map sections. While this tree doesn’t have a big story on campus, we know it was able to survive through its damage in 1952 and live on to be a permanent and beautiful part of the Union College landscape.

Bibliography:

1952, U. T. S. (n.d.). Tree Survey. map, Schenectady, NY; Special Collections and Archives, Union College.

1967, S. W. C. & F. A. and E. (n.d.). Plant Materials Inventory Union College Campus. map, Schenectady, NY; Special Collections and Archives, Union College.