QUEEN TREE

On your next Bluff Walk stroll, look for Ashburn-Coppock Park’s "Queen Tree,” who may just be the oldest tree on the downtown Memphis riverfront. Her formal name is Quercus michauxii, more commonly known as a Swamp Chestnut Oak.

The big leafy green mass stands just over 30 feet tall and is speculated to be 160-170 years old. In calculating her age, historic circumstantial
 evidence shows that this tree’s location was once
 part of Fort Pickering, a sprawling civil war structure first built by the
Confederates to utilize the ancient American mounds at Chickasaw Heritage Park. After the Union army captured Memphis in June 1862, they
enlarged and expanded the fortifications, enclosing supply houses, depots, horse corrals, and barracks with earthworks stretching from Beale Street
south to the mounds, including present-day Ashburn-Coppock Park. Construction of fortifications at that time removed all trees and shrubs that would have interfered with sight lines for artillery and other weaponry, so
this suggests that no tree on this section of our riverfront could be more than 150 years old. This tree was likely just a sapling at the time.

Fast forward to the 1960s when the nearby Rivermark Building was planning an expansion, and developers had plans to cut down the small wooded knoll to the north in its way. Downtown advocate Paul R. Coppock, a well-known columnist for the Memphis Press-Scimitar (and author of later books like Memphis Memoirs). stepped up to oppose them. Recognizing the beauty and long-term heritage value of this stand of trees, Coppock began his own crusade to preserve these trees for a future park, and by the mid-1960s, had succeeded. In his honor, his name was added to that of an historic river barge line to become Ashburn-Coppock Park.