Directly across the street from the Pat Conroy Literary Center is a small gem of an educational historic park that has become a source of pride to all who visit here.
The Witness Tree Park is an educational project of the Pat Conroy Literary Center. Our center has created and now manages and maintains a park dedicated to preserving an ancient and uniquely historic Live Oak Tree and to highlighting the historical significance of the site on which it grows. Its designation as a witness tree comes in part from The National Battlefield Trust, which designates any tree that played a role either during the Revolutionary or Civil War as one of the last living witnesses to the birth of this country.
This site came to the attention of the board when the Beaufort Historical Society offered us an iconic photograph of the tree taken in 1864 when it served as parade grounds for United States Colored Troops (known as the Connecticut 29 or USCT), which secured this tree’s place as a true “Witness Tree.” Our park adds another experience/destination for those many thousands of people who come to Beaufort annually to visit this historically important town.
With the addition of benches, our park is already being used as a meeting place, a quiet place for meditation, for poetry readings, and educational field trips for local elementary school children. The educational opportunities of this park cannot be overemphasized — from teaching Beaufort school children about the connection between their hometown and our country’s history — as students learn about African American volunteers who became soldiers to fight for the freedom of others – to exposing them to the richness of the natural world that defines our Lowcountry — to the importance of storytelling. The resilience of a tree this old, one that has survived wars, hurricanes, and disease, will inspire both adults and young children.
This “Tree of Knowledge” has already inspired local teachers to use this tree as a prompt for stories, poems, or drawings as they teach their hometown’s place in our nation’s history and teach lessons on the natural world and this unique Lowcountry environment. They learn the role trees play in producing carbon dioxide, as well as how a tree can be a home or habitat for birds and other small animals. In addition to the stories of soldiers of the Civil War era, they write poems and stories imagining everything from a family picnic to a child reading a book under its boughs, to a local fisherman selling his day’s catch under its shade. And lastly, how Beaufort’s rivers, with the ever-changing tides, helped create one of America’s finest novelists, Pat Conroy, our Prince of Tides.
Historic Witness Tree
The resilience of a tree this old, one that has survived wars, hurricanes, and disease, will serve to inspire both adults and young children.