The Rankin Oak, a champion among trees

The following is excerpted, with permission, from Margins of a Greater Wildness: Nature Essays on Stanley Creek and Beyond, a collection of essays by Richard Rankin on local topics from the Stanley Creek community in eastern Gaston County, where the Rankin family has lived for many generations.

Although Ralph and Estelle Rankin lived and worked in Chapel Hill, their connection to the old home place remained strong. Ralph regularly visited their tenants, the Allisons, following a well-established routine. On Friday he would travel from Chapel Hill to Charlotte, where he would spend the night. The next morning he would arrive at Rankintown early for breakfast. Expecting his visit, the Allisons brought out the white tablecloth and prepared their best meals. After discussing farm matters, Rankin would enact an old landowner’s ritual and walk the boundaries of his family property. He felt great affection for the place, and he particularly loved its trees. No tree on the property was more prized than the big oak. How often on visits did Rankin walk up to the tree and touch it? Or did he simply gaze upon it admiringly and reflect upon happy, past occasions spent under its stately branches?

For all the great southern red oak’s life until that time, only a close circle of landowners, their tenants and their neighbors knew about it. All that changed in 1937 when William Chambers Coker and Henry Roland Totten, two of the University of North Carolina’s most famous botanists, learned of and described the Rankintown oak in the second edition of their masterwork, Trees of the Southeastern States. Almost certainly, Ralph Rankin read the first edition of Trees of the Southeastern States when it was published in 1934 and realized his family’s southern red oak was as big as or bigger than those mentioned in the text. By the mid-1930s, Rankin, Coker and Totten had been colleagues at the university for 25 years. They surely were strong acquaintances and perhaps genuine friends. Ralph Rankin must have informed the two botanists about his family’s tree. Whether Coker and Totten traveled to see the great tree themselves is unknown. Maybe these two plant experts deputized Ralph Rankin as their field assistant and gave him specific instructions and guidance in how to measure the size of his specimen. Whoever did the measuring, the results were definitive and made their way into the second edition.

Here is what Trees of the Southeastern States says about our tree: “The large ‘Rankin Oak’ four miles northwest of Mt. Holly, N.C., has a diameter of 5 feet 6 inches four and a half feet from the ground and a limb spread of 123 feet.” While no height is listed for the Rankin Oak, pictures suggest it was between 60 and 70 feet tall. Coker and Totten listed two other large specimens of southern red oaks in their book. No mention of canopy size is made for either of these two trees, suggesting the Rankin Oak’s crown spread was notably large. No other southern red oaks are discussed in Trees of the Southeastern States. These three southern red oaks were presumably the largest known to exist.

After the publication of Trees of the Southeastern States in 1937, the Rankin Oak was official. The most respected book about regional trees had named, measured, recorded and identified it. In the world of Southeastern trees, the Rankin Oak was famous. But its new celebrity did little to change life on the farm. Visitors had always marveled when first seeing the tree. But they were visitors who had come to visit the Allisons, not the tree. No tourists flocked to the tree. The Rankin Oak’s main influence was on the lives of those who lived under its massive branches.

In 1936, a new family of tenant farmers, the Huffstetlers, replaced the Allisons and moved into the old James C. Rankin House. Ralph Rankin continued to oversee the property and make regular visits. The big tree remained a focus for social, recreational and work activities. The Huffstetler children played many of the same games as the Allisons. The base of the tree became the girls’ dollhouse with the aboveground roots, tapering into the trunk, acting as walls to create separate dollhouse rooms.

Two momentous events happened while the Huffstetlers lived at Rankintown. The first was a catastrophic fire in 1938 that consumed the James C. Rankin House. In response, Ralph Rankin built a smaller, new frame house on the original site, and the Huffstetlers occupied it. The great oak survived the fire unscathed. But about four years later, a loud crack awakened the family in the middle of the night. Lightning had struck the great oak, ripping a gash up and down the length of the trunk.

Concerned the tree would die, Ralph and his sister Estelle hired tree surgeons from nearby Mount Holly to attend to the great oak. Young workers climbed the tree, cleaned out the wound and packed it top to bottom with concrete. The Rankins paid $100 to repair the tree, a considerable sum in 1942. The great oak survived the calamity and remained healthy.

For as long as the Huffstetlers stayed at the farm, the tree remained a focal point in their lives. But in the late 1950s, they left Rankintown for southwestern Gaston County. They may have been the last tenant farmers on the Rankin property. Family farming declined sharply in Gaston County and throughout the nation in the 1960s. Ralph Rankin shifted his management focus away from tenant farming to timber management. At this point, the fate of the Rankin Oak grows obscure. Eventually the tenant house stood vacant, and the Rankin Oak stood alone. Rankintown disappeared as a rural community.

No one is certain when the Rankin Oak finally died – perhaps in the late 1960s, perhaps the 1970s. Ownership of the land passed to family members who had never lived at Rankintown and had no regard for the tree. The great tree itself was rotting, and those who remembered it were passing away. Mamie Allison Cole (b. 1922), Nell Huffstetler Crouse (b. 1929), and Margie Huffstetler Faires (b. 1939) retained cherished memories of growing up under the Rankin Oak. They are the last living witnesses who knew it well. Without them, the Rankin Oak would survive only as a reference in Trees of the Southeastern State, with no one to identify precisely where it once stood, other than “four miles northwest of Mt. Holly, N.C.” The great tree was vanishing from larger memory.

Epilogue: In 2012, the author organized a Rankin Oak reunion in hopes of finding the site of the old tree. Mamie Cole, Nell Crouse and her sister, Margie, met with the author at the old home site on Oct. 19, 2012. The women who had played under its branches agreed that a huge stump hole some 10 feet across, with chunks of concrete scattered around its perimeter, was the remains of the once mighty Rankin Oak.

Richard Rankin is headmaster at Gaston Day School, as well as a historian, conservationist and native of Gaston County and Stanley Creek.