Angel Oak, Johns Island, South Carolina

Angel Oak is thought to be the oldest thing -- living or man-made -- east of the Rockies Mountains. Angel Oak is a live oak tree (Quercus virginiana) about 1,500 years old on John's Island in South Carolina. Some have said it's much less older, but with its massive spread, it's easy to see how it could be more than a millennium in age. Its longest branch distance is 187 ft. in length. Angel Oak was the 210th tree to be registered with the Live Oak Society. Quercus virginiana, also known as the southern live oak, is a normally evergreen oak tree native to the southeastern United States. Though many other species are loosely called live oak, the southern live oak is particularly iconic of the Old South. Standing more than 65 feet high, the Angel Oak would have sprouted 1,000 years before Columbus' arrival in the New World. Recorded history traces the ownership of the live oak and surrounding land, back to the year 1717 when Abraham Waight received it as part of a small land grant. The tree stayed in the Waight family for four generations, and was part of a Marriage Settlement to Justus Angel and Martha Waight Tucker Angel. Today the live oak covers 17,100 square feet of ground. Its limbs, the size of tree trunks themselves, are so large and heavy that some of them rest on the ground (some even drop underground for a few feet and then come back up), a feature common to only the very oldest live oaks. The Angel Oak was damaged severely during Hurricane Hugo in 1989 but has since recovered. The City of Charleston has owned the tree and surrounding park since 1991.