Ice storm damaged historic KC oak tree

KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The branches of the Westport Oak shaded Indians and fur trappers on the nearby Santa Fe Trail, and supported lynchings in the years before the Civil War. After all that, the tree may have been done in by the ice storm of 2002.

The worst ice storm in the city's history tore down trees all over eastern Kansas and northwestern Missouri. The casualties included two "Bicentennial Trees," designated in 1976 because they were believed to be at least 200 years old.

The Westport Oak is a big burr oak, 50 feet tall with an even wider spread of twisting branches. The storm ripped off at least half of its crown and left jagged wounds in its trunk. A huge pile of its branches littered Washington Street last week, just north of busy 43rd Street.

"There's not money anywhere to do anything about this tree," said Betty Dawson, a self-professed tree-hugger who discovered the tree in 1976 while working as a nurse at nearby St. Luke's Hospital.

Then, the tree was surrounded by a rose garden and flowers. Today, the battered Westport Oak stands on a vacant lot. The garden, and the tree's caregivers, are gone.

"Poor baby," Dawson recently cooed while cleaning a bronze plaque designating it a bicentennial tree.

Dawson hopes private groups will step forward, trim the tree, care for it and, perhaps, give it a few more years of life.

At least one other bicentennial tree was toppled by the storm -- a burr oak in Independence, estimated to be 331 years old.

Foresters don't regularly check on the special trees, so it is uncertain how others have fared.