Footnotes to Long Island History
WORLDS LARGEST WHITE OAK
SEPT 29 1949
by
Thomas R. Bayles
Brookhaven town has the
distinction of having within its boundaries the largest white oak
tree in the world according to its registry in the National Archives
at Washington D.C. This tree is located at Stony Brook on a little
used dirt road called Lubber street.
This grand old giant measures
about seven feet in diameter and is 21 feet in circumference it
rises to a height of 84 feet and has a spread of about 118 feet.
Several years ago, the late Mrs. Frank Melville of Stonybrook employed
tree experts to brace and otherwise protect the tree from damage it
went through the 1938 hurricane with the loss of but a single branch.
These experts reported the tree to be about 400 years old, so that
it must have been a mighty tree of
ripe old age when white men first settled on the shores of Long Island.
Many are the tables this monarch of the forest could tell, of
the Indians who walked beneath its branches before the advent of the
white man. it must have echoed to the
sound of gun fire in the skirmish at Setauket during the revolution.
The ship builders of Setauket and Port Jefferson passed it by uncut,
and forest fires have left it unscathed and so it stands today
probably the oldest living thing on Long Island.