LONGWOOD, Fla. – Seminole County was once home to a tree that was over 3,500 years old. But you won’t be able to find it anymore — at least not like it used to be.
The tree — dubbed “The Senator” in 1927 after a state lawmaker donated the land on which it sits — was found at Big Tree Park in Longwood until 2012.
It was considered the largest and oldest bald cypress tree in the world, standing at around 120 feet tall. To put that into perspective, that’s even higher than three standard school buses stacked end-on-end.
According to the county, it was historically used by ancient Native Americans as a landmark and was a tourist spot since the 1800s. It used to be 165 feet tall, but its top segment was struck down in 1925 after a hurricane swept through the region.
Researchers determined that The Senator was around 3,500 years old after boring a hole into the tree and counting the rings on its trunk. This meant that The Senator was possibly the fifth-oldest tree worldwide.
The Senator continued to stand in Big Tree Park for decades, overseeing the park’s continued development over the years.
However, that changed in 2012.
On Jan. 16 of that year, The Senator was reduced to a stump after catching fire.
More than a dozen firefighters arrived at the scene that morning, laying around 1,000 feet of hose to reach the giant tree. According to fire officials at the time, The Senator had burned from the inside out.
While investigators initially said that the fire wasn’t purposefully set, detectives later deduced that it was the work of arson.
Investigators said that a Winter Park woman, Sara Barnes, had gone to the park that morning with a friend, jumped the fence around The Senator and entered into a hollowed-out portion of the tree.
After grabbing some dead leaves and other vegetative debris, Barnes started a small fire inside The Senator to allow her and her friend to see better, though the fire quickly grew out of control, court records show.
Barnes then fled to a nearby fast food restaurant, from which she watched as fire crews arrived to put out the fire.
According to those records, Barnes was taken into custody more than a month later, telling investigators that she regretted her actions and hadn’t meant for the fire to grow so big.
At the time of her arrest, investigators also said they believed that Barnes had been trafficking in illicit substances. Barnes was ultimately found guilty of burning public lands and possessing methamphetamine.
A year after the fire, small branches from The Senator were given out to the public for free. Much of the surviving wood was granted to four artists who were selected to produce art pieces in The Senator’s memory.
“I thought, ‘There’s got to be some way to memorialize this icon.’ This 3,500-year-old tree meant so much to the community and to the people,” said then-Natural Lands Manager Jim Duby. “We couldn’t just let the wood lay there and rot.”
Despite the loss, The Senator’s sister tree “Lady Liberty” still stands at the park, undamaged in the fire. While not as experienced as The Senator, she is still around 2,000 years old and nearly 90 feet tall.
The Senator’s legacy still remains, though. A high school teacher named Laymond Hardy was fascinated with cypress trees, so he worked with other researchers to develop an orchard.
As part of the project, he collected branches from The Senator in the mid-1990s to grow a clone.
After The Senator burned down, that clone — a 50-foot tree appropriately named “The Phoenix” — was planted at the park in 2013.
The Phoenix can still be spotted near the entrance to the park, planted right by the playground and parking lot.
If you’d like to visit the park, the boardwalk leading to The Senator’s remains is still available to the public.
Along the way, visitors can stop by panels that mark how old The Senator was at specific distances. The final panel is located around 160 feet in, marking how tall The Senator was at 3,500 years of age.
Interested in more weird stories about Central Florida’s history? Click here.
You can listen to every episode of Florida’s Fourth Estate in the media player below:
Copyright 2023 by WKMG ClickOrlando – All rights reserved.
