by Wesley Harris
There was a time when the trees of Ruston carried names.
Not all of them, of course. But at least two of the oaks planted in the early years of the town were known as “William Jennings Bryan” and “Woodrow Wilson.” They stood in the soil, grew taller with each passing year, and eventually became part of the shaded landscape generations of Ruston residents simply knew as home.
Trees do that. They begin as projects and end as memories.
Today, when we think of local history, we often look first to old homes, churches, schools, railroads, cemeteries or downtown buildings. But some of Ruston’s earliest and most beloved landmarks were living things. They were oak trees planted beside streets, in parks and around family homes by people who understood a young town needed more than buildings and commerce.
It also needed shade, beauty and roots.
Ruston’s old trees were not accidents of nature. Many were deliberately planted by men and women who believed they were improving the town for people they would never meet. One tree, planted even before there was a Ruston, was a cedar in front of Robert Russ’ house, although it may have been planted by Wooten Richardson, who sold Russ the land that would later become Ruston.
Railroad Park could be called the physical center of early Ruston plantings. Before it became a park, the four-acre tract beside the railroad was known as the depot grounds. It belonged to the railroad and lay open in front of the brick business block remembered as “Brick Row.” In the town’s earliest years, the open expanse gave train passengers a clear view of Ruston’s brick storefronts, the very image local leaders wanted to present to those passing through. Traveling carnivals and town events used the dusty ground before the space took on the more settled character of a park in the 1890s.
That is where Thomas Lafayette Nelson entered the story. He contracted with Ruston merchants to plant trees. The work occurred in 1896 when Nelson agreed to plant 50 oaks along Trenton and Vienna streets for 50 cents each. When three trees remained, he and his son planted them in Railroad Park.
Those three oaks became the park’s first living landmarks.
In the 1970s, many of those trees, she said, were still standing. Nelson named two of them for political figures of his day — William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson.
Whether those named trees still stood in Railroad Park or along one of the residential streets is unknown. But the additional details from the park’s history make one thing clearer: The shade later generations enjoyed downtown began with a specific civic decision and a man and his son putting young trees into Ruston soil.
The original Railroad Park oaks did not last forever. One died in the 1970s and had to be removed. The others remained well into the 1980s. Later trees replaced the originals, and during a more recent renovation, those replacements were removed for smaller varieties. Even so, the story of those first oaks remains part of the park’s identity, just as much as the fountain, the sidewalks, the bandstand and the gatherings that filled the space over the decades.
Railroad Park was a fitting place for such trees. Ruston owed its beginning to the railroad, and the park stood near the point where newcomers arrived, merchants hoped to impress passengers and local residents gathered for public life. A visitor stepping from a train might first have seen a town still young enough to remember its founding, but already planting the shade to shelter later generations.
Other early tree plantings were remembered along Vienna and Trenton streets. Trees planted at measured intervals eventually stretched their limbs over the roadway, creating leafy arches above the streets. Anyone who has driven beneath a mature canopy of oaks knows the feeling. The road seems quieter there. The traffic slows, at least in the mind. The branches overhead create a passage from one place to another and, sometimes, from one time to another.
For older Ruston residents, those tree-lined streets were part of the appearance of home.
George Holstead recalled a story he heard while drinking coffee at the Post Office Cafe with Edwin Wright in the early 1960s. Wright said when he was about 6 years old, he came to town in a wagon with his father. With them were another man and his small son. Together, the four planted oak trees along Vienna and Trenton streets. The planting occurred about 1900.
Who arranged for the trees to be planted, and who paid for the labor, is unclear. Mrs. Edwina Wright Colvin, daughter of Edwin Wright and granddaughter of James Monroe Wright, remembered her father telling the story many times. Her sister, Armede Wright Hall, also knew the account. But neither could say precisely what led to the planting.
History often comes to us that way. The names survive. The work survives. Sometimes even the trees survive. But the person who first said, “Let us plant them here,” is lost to time.
Still, there is something revealing in the story: two fathers and two sons, working together on the streets of a small North Louisiana town, placing oak trees in the ground for people they would never know.
Another tree story reaches back almost to Ruston’s founding.
Mrs. Henry Slaughter, formerly Mary Ann Marbury and known nationally as columnist “Pleasant Riderhood,” first came to Ruston in February 1884 while the town was still in its infancy. Mrs. Slaughter arrived with the intention of saving trees on her property from being destroyed by those clearing land for the new town. She brought several yards of cloth, tore it into strips and tied the pieces around the trunks of trees she wanted protected.
The white banners caused some amusement, but her purpose was serious. At a time when the railroad town was taking shape and clearing land seemed synonymous with progress, Mrs. Slaughter believed some trees deserved to remain. Years later, the grove of oaks at Bonner and Georgia avenues demonstrated the wisdom of her effort.
The trees represented a different kind of progress. They showed a town could grow without erasing every natural feature from the landscape before the streets were laid out and the buildings constructed.
Trees can thrive for a long time, but they don’t live forever.
Storms claimed some. Development claimed others. Zollie Meadows helped his father, Talbot D. Meadows, plant four oaks around 1900 around the family home on Bonner Street. By 1994, only one remained.
That tree had outlived the people who planted it. It had watched homes change hands, children grow old and unpaved roads become modern streets. Its survival was not important simply because it was large or attractive. It was important because someone still remembered how it came to be there.
The same could be said of Railroad Park itself. Over more than 125 years, the park hosted concerts, craft shows, candlelight vigils, movies, 4-H pet shows, diaper derbies, art exhibits, pep rallies, picnics, campaign speeches and street dances. Beneath the old oaks, people watched goldfish in the fountain, waited for events to begin, met friends and marked the ordinary rhythms of civic life.
Ruston almost lost the park in 1970 when the Illinois Central Railroad decided to sell the land for possible business development. The City of Ruston purchased it, making the former depot grounds public property for the first time. That purchase preserved more than an open square. It preserved a place where Ruston’s earliest tree planting, railroad heritage and community memory met.
By the 1990s, Ruston was once again planting for the future. A grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped fund a three-year downtown tree restoration effort. With assistance from Louisiana Tech faculty and students, approximately 200 trees were planted, including oak, maple, birch, redbud, crape myrtle, elm and ginkgo. Those plantings could be seen along Tech Drive and Georgia Avenue, not far from places associated with Ruston’s earliest trees.
Most of those trees are now gone, victims of disease, infrastructure improvements and street widenings.
That cedar tree at Robert Russ’ house? Proclaimed by some as the oldest tree in Ruston, it fell victim to a direct hit by the 2019 tornado that ripped through the city, leaving human death and pain in its wake. Its lifeless trunk remains standing at the corner of Coushatta Street and Lamar Avenue.
A gnarled and knotty crape myrtle in the Downtown Historic District is likely the city’s oldest tree planted after Ruston became a town. It shades the city’s oldest house, moved from Vienna in 1884, the year Ruston was born.
Nearly a century after Thomas Lafayette Nelson and his son planted oaks for the town, after the Wrights helped set out young trees, and after Mary Ann Marbury Slaughter tied white strips around trunks she refused to surrender, another generation was again placing trees in Ruston soil.
Over several decades, the Ruston Garden Club planted dozens and dozens of crape myrtles around Ruston. In recent years, the City of Ruston has added hundreds more.
Most people who pass beneath a tree do not know who planted it. But the shade remains.
Ruston’s historic oaks were more than ornaments. They were gifts from the past.
And whenever a new tree finds soil in Ruston, it makes the same promise to the future.
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