When an 18-year-old Septima P. Clark graduated from Avery Normal Institute in 1916, she landed a teaching job on Johns Island that was so isolated that it was only accessible by boat at high tide.
During recreation breaks during school days, Clark and another teacher at the Promised Land School loaded their pupils into ox-drawn carts for a short trip along Bohicket Road to the historic Angel Oak.
The tree was a quiet oasis in a racially segregated Charleston County, Clark recalled in a 1980 recorded interview with Ruth Miller and Linda Felkel, authors of The Angel Oak Story.
“Segregation was at its height, but the tree was not segregated. It was open to everybody,” said Clark, a civil rights hero to many. At the tree, the children played after they lunched on grits and oysters.
Today, the mammoth live oak, believed to be at least 500 years old, remains popular among children and adults who gaze at its high, arching limbs and low boughs that kiss the ground.
New recognition
In recent years, the Angel Oak has been tagged with honors to raise awareness of it to foster more public support for its preservation. The Angel Oak could soon receive another recognition – inclusion to the National Register of Historic Places.
The Lowcountry Land Trust and the S.C. Department of Archives and History are preparing an application to the U.S. Park Service to add the tree to the national registry.
If the Angel Oak is selected, it would become the first stand-alone tree in South Carolina and one of a few in the country to be included in the prestigious list, said Virginia Harness, an architectural historian at S.C.a Department of Archives and History.
In awe of the tree
Yvonne Clark-Rhines visited the Angel Oak with her grandmother, Septima Clark, who became a legendary educator and civil rights activist who hosted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at her President Street home. King called Clark “the mother of the movement.”
If her grandmother’s civil rights activities didn’t take her away from Charleston, Clark-Rhines recalled that she would be part of the family’s Sunday outings to the Angel Oak. Her family, she said, “was in awe of the tree.”
If the tree is added to the National Register, Clark-Rhines said her grandmother “would be very proud of South Carolina for bestowing this honor on the tree because it meant so much to her.”
Clark-Rhines, who lives near Atlanta, is co-author of the children’s book Teaching for Change: How Septima Clark Led the Civil Rights Movement to Voting Justice. The book is scheduled to be released in January 2026.
Feel the energy
Samantha Siegel, Angel Oak Preserve director at Lowcountry Land Trust, also has a love affair with the tree since she first saw it in 2008. Siegel modestly said it was her idea to seek the national registry nomination.
The national honor, she said, could help in the Land Trust’s efforts to raise $13 million to create a preserve around the still-growing tree to protect it and to tell its history. So far, the nonprofit organization is halfway through its goal.
“I was shocked at how little people know of the tree’s history,” Siegle lamented. “There is no cultural interpretation at the site.” Each year, more than 400,000 people visit the tree, but few of them know it stands on the site of the former Angel Plantation, she said.
Architectural historian Brittany Tulla, owner of BVL Historic Preservation Research in Charleston, prepared the nomination application for the tree.
“I wanted to know whose footsteps have been around it,” Siegel said with curiosity. “You can just feel the energy there.”
Ecology meets culture
The land trust is finalizing an agreement with the city of Charleston to determine how each will care for the tree, which sits in a two-acre park owned by the city, Siegel said. The city is the custodian of the tree, and the trust owns 35 acres that surround the park.
The city’s park and tree administrator David Grant and Bartlett Tree Experts will take care of the tree, she explained. The Land Trust will oversee public programs at the tree, which is in good shape in spite of its age, she added.
Plans to protect the tree could include closing Angel Oak Road in 2026 because the tree’s roots have extended to it. “We need a pervious parking lot within a five-minute walk to the tree instead of driving up to it,” she said.
Other grand trees and freshwater wetlands in the preserve provide clues to why the Angel Oak has lived so long, she said. “This tree is not living alone,” Siegel said. “The tree is a unique place where ecology and culture meet.”
A half-century after Clark took her students to the Angel Oak in ox-drawn carts, legendary civil rights leader Esau Jenkins drove students and visitors to Johns Island in his buses.
Jenkins was amazed at the tree’s size, its age and that it was still growing, said Jenkins’s daughter, Elaine Jenkins. “He viewed it as a wonder of nature.”
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