Andy Duffie and Austin Luchak
"Back to the very beginning." At StoryCorps, Andy Duffie of the Aggie Century Tree Project tells the remarkable history of the Live Oak that's famous to all Texas A&M students and former students. He talks with Austin Luchak, a recent recipient of the Century Tree Scholarship Fund.
- [Andy] To fully appreciate the history of the century tree, you really have to go back to the very beginning, which was October 4, 1876 when the Agricultural, Mechanical College of Texas opened for business. At the time, the campus was a vast grassland, located about five miles south of Bryan, Texas, which was the closest town. There were only three buildings on the campus at the time. The first building was the main building, later called Old Main, which was an all purpose building. It had classrooms, it had laboratories, workshops, it had faculty offices, it had the library, it had a general store, it even had the arsenal, where weapons and ammunition were kept. And so it served many purposes. The second building was Gathwright Hall. Gathwright Hall was, in essence, a boarding house that served as an early day dorm. The upper three floors were rooms where the cadets lived and the bottom floor was a large dining room with a kitchen attached. The third building was located along the railroad tracks near current day Wellborn Road. It faced Old Main and that depot was the stopping spot if you were to get off the train to go to the college. And so the name of the stop along the railway was just College and the depot became known as the College Station. And that's where the name of the town originated. In the early years there was no running water, there was no electricity, there was no indoor plumbing. And so the source of water was captured rainwater from the rooftops of Old Main and Gathwright Hall, collected in guttering and ran to underground cisterns. And that was their source of water for drinking and for bathing. In those early years, new buildings were added gradually but as the additional buildings were added there was a greater demand for firewood to heat the buildings during the winter. And so soon most of the native trees on campus were soon chopped down or sawed down to be used as firewood in the potbelly stoves inside the buildings. So it didn't take many years for the campus to become a barren grassland with no scenic value whatsoever. There were homes for the faculty and their wives and families on campus and the prominent wives on campus got together and decided that it was time to beautify the campus with more trees and they insisted that new trees be planted. But no one really had a clue as to which species of trees would do well in the campus soil and campus climate. And so the A&M horticulture department undertook the large task of trying to determine which species of trees would do well in this soil and this climate. And so the horticulture department planted over 70 different species of test trees in three little grove areas around the current day academic plaza on campus. They cared for and they monitored these trees for 20 years. And at the end of that 20 year period, the horticulture department was under the direction of Dr. EJ Kyle. Yes, that Kyle of Kyle Field. But the conclusion of this report was that the live oak was the species of choice to live in the native soil on campus and in this climate. And because of that decision, over 80% of the 11,000 trees currently on campus are live oaks. But it was that live oak test ceiling that was planted as an 18-inch little tree in 1891. And because of its prolific growth, it became the tree of choice for the A&M campus. There is a photo of this tree taken about 1907 when the tree was about 16 years old and it shows the tree well developed, about a foot in diameter, probably 25 feet tall. But in the background you can see the north wall of Old Main, the first building I mentioned earlier. That gives us an idea of where this tree was planted. Over the years, all of the other test trees went away. But the test tree for the live oak species remained. And it is the tree that we know today as the century tree.