Name:
No official name is given on the marker. The name Harley's Tree is taken from a geocache that originates at this location, presumably due to the name of the Harley-Davidson dealership where the tree is located.Location:
Harley's Tree is at the northeast corner of Braker Lane and the northbound frontage road of Interstate Highway 35, in the parking lot of a Harley-Davidson dealership.Historical Signficance:
Taken from the inscription on an undated marker with no indication of who or what organization put the marker in place:"This live oak tree, with a circumference of 15'8", a diameter of 5', may be 700 years old. This means that it began growing at about the time the crusades of the middle ages were coming to an end. When Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492 and when Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg in 1517, it would then have been over 200 years old. Cabeza de Vaca on his way across Texas in the 1530's could have rested in its shade. Indians of the area were perhaps camping near it when Coronado and DeSoto were conducting their explorations between 1539 and 1542. It was a sturdy patriarch in the late 1600's when LaSalle built Fort St. Louis on the Gulf Coast and the first Franciscan missionaries went to East Texas. It existed under the Six Flags of the French, Spanish, Mexican, Texian, United States, and Confederate regimes. If a tree follows the news, it may in the 1820's have Tonkawa and Comanche Indians speak of the coming of Stephen F. Austin and other empresarios with their settlers in the 1820's and 1830's. Travelers passing it spoke of the fall of the Alamo in 1836 and of secession in 1861. It watched quietly as cattle were driven up the Chisholm Trail in the 1870's and as the Capitol was rising in the Austin of the 1880's. It has seen automobiles replace horses in this century and it has observed the growth of Austin from a frontier village to a modern city."