A friend asked me to be a passenger while she practiced managing a car for the Michigan driver’s license test.
She needed a blend of town, country, and freeway driving.
That sounded like a ride to Manchester.
I had not been to Manchester in forty years.
I remembered it as a seemingly sleepy little town with a lot of history boiling under its placid surface.
I directed my driver west on Huron and Jackson Road, for a bit of town driving, and then we took Interstate 94 for a sample of freeway life, then south on two-lane blacktop M-52 to Manchester.
There was one thing I wanted to see: the massive bur oak tree that my journalism helped save from the road commission’s chainsaw back in 1985.
“Turn right on Main,” I said. I knew Main Street in Manchester would become Austin Road. The famous bur oak was on Austin Road.
After a few minutes of driving we had nearly reached the Jackson County line. I couldn’t remember where the tree was.
I was disappointed. “Back to Ann Arbor.”
Where was that tree?
At home, I tapped my name and “bur oak” into my computer and found the January 10, 1985 Detroit Free Press story I wrote that won me an award from the Austin Road Bur Oak Rescue Society. My story helped save the magnificent tree from being turned into kindling. I wonder what happened to that tree in the forty years since I wrote this story that I reprint with permission of the Detroit Free Press.
Headline: ANCIENT OAK A BUR IN SIDE OF ROAD PANEL
Sub-Head:
Byline: JOEL THURTELL
FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER
Pub-Date: 1/10/1985
Memo: ALSO RAN IN WAYNE WEST AND DOWNRIVER ZONES
Correction:
Text: Gaita Cathey’s first memories of Manchester’s controversial bur oak tree
run back to 1901, when she was five.
In those days, the tree was not a burning political issue — only a source
of shade to people bouncing in buggies on the one-track dirt road beneath it.
Now, the Washtenaw County Road Commission says the tree is a hazard to
drivers and should be cut down.
The commission’s attempt at removing the tree has prompted criticism from
local people, like Edward (Simon) Steele, publisher of the weekly Manchester
Enterprise, and former Gov. John Swainson, president of the Manchester
Historical Society.
Says Steele: “If anybody hits that, they’re in violation of the law —
they’re either drunk or going too fast.”
The debate has drawn letters from tree-lovers as far away as Australia.
In Detroit, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo and Niles, people who feel Michigan’s
tree-lined roads are vanishing have sent letters of outrage to Washtenaw
County newspapers — and to the Road Commission.
UNDER PUBLIC PRESSURE, the Road Commission has promised to consider
alternatives to removing the tree. A decision is expected within two weeks,
said John Laird, Road Commission attorney.
Critics complain that it was the commission’s improvement program this
summer that widened the road, placing the two-lane blacktop only three feet
from the tree.
In fact, the road’s encroachment on the tree has been gradual, beginning
in pioneer days.
In the 1830s, the first settlers found the big bur oak one of a cluster of
oaks flourishing on a rich, grassy prairie four miles west of their new town
of Manchester.
For a century, danger was not an issue. The road was traveled by wagons,
stagecoaches and buggies.
“Carriages didn’t run into trees,” said Laird.
To early travelers on M-11, the tree was the best part of a trip down that
state highway.
The worst part was the highway.
“I can remember the dust so bad, my mother always kept the windows closed,”
recalled 65-year-old Howard Parr, who grew up in a house facing the road.
Cathey remembers riding in her father’s carriage past the tall oak. “It
looked to me always the same size,” she said.
“It was huge,” agrees Arlone Hackaman, 72, who first saw the tree in 1917,
when her family moved into a house behind it.
To Hackaman, the tree was a friend, a symbol of safety. Her four-year-old
brother stood under it and sold popcorn to road workers in the 1920s, and “we
always had to stop by the big tree to look before we crossed the road.”
An 1874 map shows the road making a sharp jog to the south, avoiding the
tree.
A 1919 MAP seems to indicate how earlier road commissioners felt about the
tree. “Save oak,” some anonymous official wrote on the map.
But the workers who bought popcorn from Hackaman’s brother in the 1920s
were widening the road, bringing it a step closer to confrontation with the
tree.
In Manchester, feelings about the dispute are mixed.
Barber Keith Reed thinks that if residents voted, the tree would be saved.
Still, he is ambivalent: “It would be a terrible thing after this fight to
have a family hit it.”
Big as the tree is, however, it never has been hit. Robert Belcher, a
retired Eastern Michigan University botany professor, inspected the base and
found no evidence of injuries.
“There is no butt rot,” Belcher said. “That’s absolute proof that it has
never had a serious collision.”
NONETHELESS, it was worth avoiding, even 60 years ago. The 1919 county
survey says its diameter was 42 inches. Since then, it has grown nearly 11
inches, said Belcher.
It is big for a bur oak, but its 68-foot height puts it out of the running
as a state champion tree. It ranks as the 10th biggest bur oak in the state,
said Paul Thompson, of the Michigan Botanical Club.
“One of the reasons it’s not a champion is that it doesn’t have enough
trunk,” Belcher said. “At some point it decided to stop growing up and instead
grew out.”
The tree seems pretty big to Fletcher Des Autels, too. The Washtenaw County Road Commission highway engineer is worried that someday a motorist will
crash into it. It’s just too close to the road, he says.
Des Autels was not with the Road Commission in 1977, when a rumor that the
tree was to be cut led Napoleon attorney Thomas Ellis to seek an injunction
against the cutting in Washtenaw Circuit Court.
A judge ordered the commission to leave the tree alone.
AFTER THE ROAD was repaved last summer, the Road Commission held two
hearings on cutting the tree. Only two people attended, and nobody spoke
either way, said Manchester Township Supervisor Clarence Fielder, one of the
two who attended the hearings.
This time, a judge agreed with the commission that the tree could be cut.
Following his ruling, Fielder held a special meeting attended by
preservationists.
But Fielder was unswayed.
“It’s a big, beautiful tree — I’m not arguing that point,” said Fielder.
But “the Road Commission has liability suits all the time because people hit
trees.”
“To me, people are much more important than trees. We have a lot of them
in Michigan, and we can grow trees anytime,” added Fielder. “Every time the
Road Commission wants to cut a tree, people come out of the woods. There has
to be some kind of a policy for the Road Commission to cut those trees and not
have a big hellaboo.”
Besides, said Fielder “it’s starting to die a bit. There are some dead
limbs.”
BELCHER DISAGREES. Some lower limbs are starving for lack of light, but
“it’s a healthy tree — there’s no reason why it shouldn’t continue for
another century or two.”
After the Road Commission’s latest attempt to cut the tree, Ellis was
joined in his battle to save the tree by one of the tree’s neighbors — Mick
Landis, 27.
“Then the fun started,” said Des Autels.
“I found out they were going to cut it down, and I thought I’d put my two
cents in,” said Landis, who approached the Manchester Historical Society and
its president, Swainson, for help.
The former governor lent his support but advised Landis and Ellis to form
their own organization to save the tree.
That’s how the ARBOR Society was formed, for Austin Road Bur Oak Rescue.
Landis circulated a petition to save the tree. Angry letters began
appearing in area newspapers.
“WHAT REALLY concerns people — and the tree is symbolic of that — is that
these road commissions all over the state are indiscriminately cutting down
the trees,” Landis said. “Michigan is known for its tree-lined roads, and
they’re disappearing.”
“Bull—-,” said Des Autels. “As a highway engineer, I’m responsible for
safety. How’d you like to get a call from the state police that your kid was
killed when he wrapped his car around that tree?”
But the Michigan Department of Transportation disagrees.
“It is on the inside of a curve, and coming either way, you generally are
not heading toward the tree — it’s not a target,” said Larry Alber, a
department environmentalist who suggested the road could be moved away from
the tree.
Describing the tree as “an unusual botanical specimen because of its large
size,” Department of Transportation botanist Kim Herman also recommended the
tree be left alone.
On Dec. 12, the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners entered the fray,
with Chairwoman Mary Egnor writing the Road Commission to urge compromise.
“There are hundreds of trees in our county which pose more imminent hazards
than the tree in question,” said Egnor, suggesting the commission place a
shock-absorbing guardrail around the tree.
Will the tree be cut?
“Hell, no,” said Fielder. “It’s got too political. It should go, but it
won’t.”
ARBOR has achieved its goal politically, rather than legally, said
Swainson. “I’m sure that the tree will never be touched.”
Caption:
Illustration: PHOTO COLOR AL KAMUDA
Edition: METRO FINAL
Section: NWS
Page: 1A
Keywords: ROAD; TREE; CONTROVERSY
Disclaimer:
John Swainson was wrong.
A quick google search showed me that the Washtenaw County Road Commission did not set aside its ancient grudge against the Austin Road bur oak.
Sometime in 2011, the tree was cut down.
It is not clear when or how or even by whom.
It seems that the Manchester Enterprise newspaper that opposed the cutting in 1985 was defunct in 2011. The current newspaper, The Manchester Mirror, did not exist until 2013. There was no town newspaper to report on the road commission’s plans.
Is it possible that townspeople were not aware that the tree was going to be cut?
Did nobody care?
Who knows the real story of the Austin Road bur oak?
Drop me a line: joelthurtell(at)gmail.com
