Qualla: Mingo Oak

Mingo Oak: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celticchrys, CC BY-SA 3.0. The tree was already two hundred years old when Columbus made landfall. It had sprouted from an acorn around 1356, give or take a quarter century, in a cove at the base of Trace Mountain in what is now Mingo County, West Virginia. By 1931, when John Keadle and Leonard Bradshaw of Williamson finally measured it, the Mingo Oak stood more than 200 feet tall with a trunk nearly ten feet across (9 feet 10 inches in diameter) and a crown 130 feet wide. The Smithsonian Institution confirmed what the locals had long suspected: this was the oldest and largest living white oak tree in the world. It had seven years left to live.

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Image: Celticchrys | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mingo Oak: A Cove That Was Never Cut

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kmusser, CC BY-SA 2.5. The Allegheny Plateau, west of the Appalachian crest, was carpeted with old-growth oak and chestnut forest for roughly 300 million years before European settlers reached it. Cove topography — small protected valleys closed at one or both ends — held the deepest soils and the stea...

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Image: Kmusser | CC BY-SA 2.5

Mingo Oak: Saved for Its Lifetime

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon Sullivan, Public domain. The Island Creek Coal Company, the North East Lumber Company, and the Cole and Crane Real Estate Trust jointly owned the land where the tree stood. In an unusually generous gesture for the era, the three companies leased 1.5 acres around the oak to the West Virginia Game, Fish, a...

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Image: Jon Sullivan | Public domain

Mingo Oak: What Killed It

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celticchrys, CC BY-SA 3.0. In the summer of 1937, leaves emerged on only a few branches. In February 1938, biologist Earl M. Vanscoy wrote in the journal Castanea that the tree was almost dead. Nearby, in Trace Gap, a coal spoil tip belonging to the Island Creek Coal Company had been burning. Sulfur fumes ...

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Image: Celticchrys | CC BY-SA 3.0

Mingo Oak: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Celticchrys, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Smithsonian received a cross-section of the trunk. So did the West Virginia State Museum. Under the terms of the lease, the land around the former tree reverted to the Island Creek Coal Company the day after the felling, and the small state park ceased to exist. The West Virg...

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Image: Celticchrys | CC BY-SA 3.0