Late on Monday, August 26, a ferocious storm ripped through Montclair, NJ. High winds brought the beloved Olmsted Oak, a centerpiece of Anderson Park, to a crashing end. Heavy winds and rain, combined with what revealed itself to be a rotted trunk, felled this magnificent white oak, estimated to be around 175 years old.
Through some five generations, this tree has witnessed history unfurl: It probably sprouted before the Civil War. Early Dutch settlers walked past it. The oak was here before the Upper Montclair Train Station and all the homes and businesses that followed that engine of change.
Landscape architect John Charles Olmsted captured it in a photograph when he visited the park under construction in September 1904. Since 1905, when Anderson Park opened, it has been the elder statesman, the shady embrace, the high-density housing for insects, birds, squirrels, raccoons.
Adoring humans have married beneath its spreading boughs and gravitated to its shade for picnics, story time, chamber music concerts, a kiss on a blanket.
Its collapse is an aching loss, but there is hope: Friends of Anderson Park’s botanist, John Colando, had the foresight to plant some of its acorns a while back, and he is tending to a sapling that is now about 2 feet tall. When the time is right, we’ll transplant it to the park. And come spring, we will plant another white oak and begin nurturing a new legacy.
