What started with planting live oaks at a Louisiana university became a society in 14 states

Lafayette native Pat Trahan took up walking between her job in Lafayette's Oil Center and her home near downtown a few years ago, exercise that afforded her the opportunity to cross the campus of her alma mater, the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

“UL has a really nice campus,” she said. Out-of-town family members told her that whenever they came to town, and her frequent walks also reminded her of that.

Framing the original campus are majestic live oaks that line the sidewalks near the intersection of Johnston and College (now University), across from the Roy House. Through the years, Trahan has come to love the oaks.

Trahan asked Curious Louisiana who was responsible for all of the oak trees on the old campus. The ready answer is the same guy who did almost everything on the original campus of the Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute, now UL-Lafayette: Edwin L. Stephens, an LSU graduate and the remarkable first president.

Only 27 when he was appointed to develop and lead SLII, Stephens was overseeing construction of the first campus building in 1900 when he decided to provide shade over some of the flat, barren 25 acres of donated former cane fields on which the campus rested. On Jan. 1, 1901, the first day of the 20th century, he planted oaks with the volunteer help of Jack Nickerson — perhaps as few as 10 live oaks, according to Harry Chatterton, an agriculture professor in 1919 — at that northern intersection. Eight of those original oaks survive today, said Liz Landry, who oversaw the 100th-anniversary celebration of the university at the turn of the 21st century.

In an article in The American Magazine published in the 1930s, Stephens wrote it wasn’t until the oaks began to flourish that he thought of them again. “Then they began to grow beautiful as a feature of the landscape, my interest was resumed and greatly increased,” he said.

Stephens loved the strength and permanence of oaks. He wrote a sonnet about oaks. He had more planted around the expanded campus. He sent seedlings to other local schools. He purchased his first car, a Nash, in the 1930s and with his wife, Beverly, drove throughout the region looking for oaks, assessing them, measuring them.

In 1934, Stephens founded the Live Oak Society, which recognizes documented 100-year-old oaks. He chose 43 oaks for initial enrollment; oaks themselves are the society’s “members,” except for the society chairman, who enrolls eligible trees.

The society's website says it now extends to 14 states and more than 9,000 members. Society officers are: Seven Sisters Oak, president, near Lake Pontchartrain; vice presidents are Middleton Oak, South Carolina; St. John Cathedral Oak, Lafayette; Lagarde Oak, Luling; and the Martha Washington Live Oak, Audubon Park. Members in Lafayette, East Baton Rouge and Orleans parishes are well represented.

A century after Stephens planted his first “class” of oaks on campus, UL-Lafayette marked the centennial for the institution and those first trees. Julie Dronet, then campus spokesperson, chaired a committee to mark the occasion. The last centennial event featured then-President Ray Authement planting new oaks on the South Campus on Jan. 1, 2001.

Today Stephens’ life-size image stands near the intersection where Stephens planted the campus’ first oaks and seems to gaze at the results of his handiwork. LSU-educated sculptor Patrick Miller was its creator. Stephens' words, at the sculpture’s base, say, “To my mind, the live oak is the noblest of all our trees, the most to be admired for its beauty, the most to be respected for its majesty and dignity and grandeur, most to be praised for its strength .…"

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