Why the Oak Is America’s National Tree

If you live in the United States, you probably know that the country has a national anthem and a national bird. But did you know it has a national tree?

In 2004, Congress passed a bill designating oak as the country’s official tree. The decision was based on a vote that the Arbor Day Foundation conducted three years earlier. Some 400,000 people participated, and around one-quarter of them selected oak as the tree that should represent America.

“It really wasn’t a huge surprise that oak was chosen as the national tree,” says Dan Lambe, CEO of the Arbor Day Foundation. Over 60 species of oak trees (Quercus) grow in the United States. “They grow in the humid southeast, the arid southwest and the cold northern states. So from coast to coast, they really are a symbol for all Americans.”

These resilient trees provide expansive shade when the sun is too hot, help clean the air by absorbing pollutants and play a key role in shaping their ecosystems. They’ve also played a significant role in U.S. history, serving as a hiding place during a colonial charter dispute, providing raw materials for the USS Constitution and marking a meaningful gathering spot for freed Black Americans during the Civil War.

In Connecticut, the state tree is not just a species of oak, but a specific historical tree known as the Charter Oak. The tree got its name from an incident in 1687, when an official representing King James II of England met with members of the Connecticut Colony to strip it of its charter. The king aimed to bring Connecticut under the short-lived Dominion of New England along with other New England colonies and New York.

Legend has it that while the colonists were debating the official in Hartford, the candles in the room suddenly went out. When they were relit, the charter had disappeared from the room. According to popular lore, one of the colonists had grabbed it and hidden it in an oak outside to prevent the official from taking it. After this incident, that white oak (Quercus alba) became known as the Charter Oak. Although it fell during a lightning storm in 1856, Connecticut has continued to honor the historical tree as a state symbol.

White oak also played a key role during the War of 1812, in which the USS Constitution earned its nickname “Old Ironsides” for its apparent ability to repel British cannonballs as though its walls were made of iron. But it wasn’t iron in those sides: The warship’s hull was actually made of white oak and southern live oak (Quercus virginiana). Today, preservationists continue to use oak to restore the Constitution, which is now more than 225 years old.

A southern live oak played a significant role during the Civil War, too. In May 1861, Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia, became the first Union fort to declare that it would not force formerly enslaved people to return to the Confederacy. Over the next few months, hundreds of Black Americans escaped slavery by fleeing to the Union outpost within Confederate Virginia. That September, a free Black woman named Mary Smith Peake taught her first class of formerly enslaved students under a southern live oak tree at Fort Monroe.

In January 1863, Black Americans at Fort Monroe gathered under that same oak to hear a reading of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which shifted the Union’s focus in the war to seeking the complete abolition of slavery. After this, the tree became known as the Emancipation Oak. Today, it is part of the campus of Hampton University, a school founded in 1868 to teach freedmen and freedwomen.

When the Arbor Day Foundation launched its 2001 vote for America’s tree, it gave voters 21 broad categories to choose from that included the state trees of all 50 states and Washington, D.C. (voters could also write in a tree). The foundation announced the oak’s victory on that year’s Arbor Day at a tree-planting ceremony at the U.S. Capitol.

In 2004, Representative Bob Goodlatte of Virginia helped pass a bill to make the oak the country’s national tree based on the Arbor Day Foundation’s voting results. The bill became law that year without controversy, though there was an interesting exchange when Goodlatte advocated for the bill in the House of Representatives’ Judiciary Committee.

“I received a lot of heat from the American Palm Tree Association about this,” reported Congressman Ric Keller of Florida, where the state tree is the sabal palm (Sabal palmetto). “There was an oak tree that recently fell on my mom’s home in Hurricane Charley that resulted in it totally being razed. I just want to know if the author would consider a minor substitution to change the word ‘oak’ to ‘palm’ in this amendment.”

Goodlatte responded that the palm tree “wasn’t even close in the running” (the runner-up was redwood, with nearly 81,000 votes, followed by dogwood, maple and pine). Hearing this, Keller conceded and agreed to vote for the bill with “oak” in it.

Despite many worthy contenders, Lambe thinks oak is “a great symbol” for the United States: “Oak trees are so valuable in the shade they provide in our communities, the nuts and habitat they provide for wildlife [and] the beauty and resiliency that they provide in neighborhoods and communities from coast to coast.”