Lone Oak Historic Tree

Southern Live Oak, Quercus virginiana

The majestic Live Oak is the namesake of the long abandoned Lone Oak community that served as a community gathering place and burial ground before the founding of Luling around 1874 in southern Caldwell County.

The Story

The Lone Oak Historic Tree sits alone today beside US Highway 90/183 on the outskirts of Luling in southern Caldwell County. The known story of the big live oak starts in the mid-1850s when the first settlers in the area decided to make a burial ground in the shade of its tall and wide branches. In the prior decades, the Tree likely served as a waypoint along the trail from Gonzales to San Marcos, along the north side of the San Marcos River. The trail also passed through the new settlements at Prairie Lea and Atlanta and served as a property boundary when the original land grant was divided among the settlers.

One of the early settlers was Powhatan Augustus Swann[1] who arrived from Alabama with his mother in the mid-1850s. He purchased the land with the Tree on the north side of the trail as a homestead for his parents. Mr. Swann moved on shortly thereafter, but not before donating the acre of land with the Tree and the burial ground to Caldwell County. A chapel which also served as a schoolhouse was built next to the burial ground that became the center of the community which was named Lone Oak.

About this same time, many settlers were arriving in southern Caldwell County from Georgia. One of the most prominent of these new arrivals was Col. Leonard Corder Huff. Col. Huff brought his family and a large entourage to settle the land just west of the Lone Oak Historic Tree. He made a small fortune from the sale of a gold mine in Georgia and quickly became the prominent businessman in the area. Col. Huff buried his first wife and a son in the burial ground at Lone Oak in 1858. He was later interred there after his death in 1873.

Anne Corder Huff Bridges, daughter of Col. Huff, was born in 1862 and grew up in the area soon to become Luling. She wrote stories of the early days around Luling that were published by her daughter in the Luling Signal throughout 1945. In one installment of the story, she describes the trail between Prairie Lea (to the northwest of Lone Oak) and Atlanta (to the southeast of Lone Oak) prior to the establishment of Luling in 1874. The part of the described trail starts a couple of miles west of present day Luling and follow the present day US Hwy 90/183 east of Luling. The section reads[2]:

After crossing Seals Creek, the road cut into Col. Huff’s “upper plantation” … and there the route was rough, stony ground full of all the native thorny shrubs and cacti. This unimproved land was called “buffalo wallow prairie,” sloping southward to the river. The low places, shallow ponds, were nearly always full of clear rain water, with green enormous senna, rushes, lespedeza, bluebonnets and other Texas flora in season…Following the low range of hills, with Rocky fork of Salt Branch a short distance to the north, the road made a graceful curve to the Huff home plantation to enter a wide lane formed by cotton and corn fields, orchard, watermelon and potato patches…From Seals Creek west to a bois d’arc hedge east, this thoroughfare was five miles on Huff land.

This bois d’arc hedge was a boundary line to the land owned by Miss Bessie Anderson and her widowed mother. The road was the north line. Powhatan Swann lived on the north side of the road. He gave to the county one acre for a burying ground and the neighbors built a small chapel-school. The name is still Lone Oak. Mr. Swann also sold small parcels of land to poor white immigrants and ex-slaves. Just east of Lone Oak were the McKinneys’, Charley Henrys, Abe Brothers, then Johnston’s store. Mr. Swann’s daughter Henrietta married Uncle Joe Johnston.

The Lone Oak community went into decline and soon disappeared when the Galveston Harrisburg & San Antonio Railroad arrived and established the town of Luling on the old Huff Plantation land in 1874. Soon after, Luling became a popular stop on the Chisholm Trail. Any cattle driven from southern coastal Texas through Gonzales would have passed beneath the Lone Oak Historic Tree prior to arriving in Luling. The Live Oak would continue to witness burials at Lone Oak for the next 100 years.

Today, the Lone Oak Historic Tree is showing its age. Decay has settled in on one side of the trunk and made significant inroads. The Tree shows signs of being significantly burned and has weathered the extremes of storms and droughts. But you would never know it looking at the Tree from a distance. Up close, you can find a nice sized prickly pear growing about twenty feet up on a branch.

On November 9th, 2025, Tree nominator Melissa Doss and Caldwell County historians hosted the Texas Historic Tree Coalition to the old Lone Oak cemetery site to honor the Lone Oak Historic Tree. In addition, descendants of the pioneering Huff family came to honor the Tree and site of the burial of the pioneering family patriarchs.

References

1. “Powhatan Augustus Swann”, Swann/Swan Family DNA and Genealogy Research, accessed November 30, 2025.
2. Bridges, Anne C. Huff, edited by Mary Louise Bridges Witt, “Do You Remember?”, Texas GenWeb, Caldwell County, Research Center, 1967.