Big Tree Park in Seminole County, Florida

Photograph: Longwood Senator Park Lady01.jpg by Ebyabe · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Restored from the credited Wikimedia Commons file, normalized to the consistent attraction-card frame and converted to WebP by 1stFlorida.com. Portrait originals retain their complete composition over a softly blurred extension of the same photograph.

Seminole County attraction

Big Tree Park

Seminole County · Central Florida

The park at Longwood where the Senator stood, a bald cypress about 3,500 years old until a woman burned it down in 2012.

ABOUT THIS PLACE

The Senator was a bald cypress dating to roughly 1550 before the common era, 125 feet tall with a trunk over eleven feet across, and it was the largest and oldest of its kind in the world. Seminole people and others before them used it as a landmark. State Senator Moses Overstreet gave the tree and the land around it to the public in 1927 and the tree was named for him, and Calvin Coolidge is said to have dedicated the site in 1929. On January 16, 2012, a 26-year-old woman set a fire inside the hollow trunk so she could see to smoke methamphetamine. It burned from within and the crews could not save it. She was sentenced to thirty months. What stands now is a charred stump twenty to twenty-five feet high. Lady Liberty, another cypress about 2,000 years old, still stands nearby, and a clone of the Senator called the Phoenix was planted when the park reopened in 2014

GETTING THERE

Get Directions ↗Official Website ↗

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