Folklore
The Eliot Oak
IN that part of Boston formerly constituting the town of Brighton, and still farther back forming a precinct of Cam- bridge, there is a pleasant locality called Oak Square. It was so named on account of the old oak-tree which stood there, and which is probably better known as…
Work
- Type
- folk narrative
- Creator
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Created, as stated
- 1884
The tale
IN that part of Boston formerly constituting the town of Brighton, and still farther back forming a precinct of Cam- bridge, there is a pleasant locality called Oak Square. It was so named on account of the old oak-tree which stood there, and which is probably better known as the Eliot Oak. This gigantic relic of the primeval forest was in its day the largest and the oldest tree of its species growing within the four boundaries of the old Bay State, and it was officially declared to be so by a scientific commission which was charged with making a botanical survey of the State. The declaration is made that " It had probably passed its prime centuries before the first English voice was heard on the shores of Massachusetts Bay." Its circumference at the ground was given at twenty- five feet and nine inches, or two feet more than that of the Great Elm of Boston. Through decay the trunk became hollow at the base, furnishing a cavity large enough to serve as a hid- ing-place for the schoolboys who played under tlie shade of its wide-spreading branches. The enormous weight of these, with their foliage, was at last supported by a mere shell of trunk, and as every gale threatened to lay…
- Narrative type
- origin story
- The printing this telling comes from
- Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) (1884)
- First attestation in print
- Not held. The archive holds the printing above and no evidence of an earlier one, and it does not treat a collection's date as a first printing.
Tellings
A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings. Each is given whole, with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884)
Told by unattributed — the collector names no informant · collected by Samuel Adams Drake · 1884
IN that part of Boston formerly constituting the town of Brighton, and still farther back forming a precinct of Cam- bridge, there is a pleasant locality called Oak Square. It was so named on account of the old oak-tree which stood there, and which is probably better known as the Eliot Oak. This gigantic relic of the primeval forest was in its day the largest and the oldest tree of its species growing within the four boundaries of the old Bay State, and it was officially declared to be so by a scientific commission which was charged with making a botanical survey of the State. The declaration is made that " It had probably passed its prime centuries before the first English voice was heard on the shores of Massachusetts Bay." Its circumference at the ground was given at twenty- five feet and nine inches, or two feet more than that of the Great Elm of Boston. Through decay the trunk became hollow at the base, furnishing a cavity large enough to serve as a hid- ing-place for the schoolboys who played under tlie shade of its wide-spreading branches. The enormous weight of these, with their foliage, was at last supported by a mere shell of trunk, and as every gale threatened to lay it low, to the regret of thou- sands, the brave old oak was through a hard necessity compelled to bite the dust. By an order of the town it was cut down in May, 1855. A little west of this tree was the former site of the wigwam of Waban, Chief of the Nonantums, and he must often have rested under its generous shade. The old Indian trail extended
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
Questions this record answers
Each answer is composed only from fields this record carries, and names the attestation for what it says. A question the record cannot answer from its own attested content is not asked here. Where a boundary is described as official it was promulgated by an authority with the power to draw it and is not amended by anything on the vernacular layer; where it is described as vernacular it is held by attestation alone and amends no official boundary.
In which printing does the archive hold The Eliot Oak?
Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884) The printing is dated 1884. This is the printing this archive's own telling was lifted from, and the archive can hand over the volume. It is not a claim that the tale was first printed there.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
How many tellings of The Eliot Oak does the archive hold?
One telling: As printed in Samuel Adams Drake (1884) (unattributed — the collector names no informant). A tale told several ways is one record and several tellings, each given whole with its teller named — or recorded as unattributed where the collector left them unnamed, which is itself a fact about the collection.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
Who collected The Eliot Oak?
Samuel Adams Drake. The archive records the collector separately from the teller, because who wrote a tale down and who told it are different facts and collapsing them destroys both.
Attested by: Samuel Adams Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore in Prose and Poetry (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884)
What does the archive hold for The Eliot Oak, and under what license?
The Boston Archive holds this record of The Eliot Oak from Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Public domain — published before 1929 (public domain). 7 recorded transforms stand between the retrieved bytes and this record. Attribution is due to Samuel Adams Drake.
Attested by: Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884), retrieved 2 September 2026, under Public domain — published before 1929.
Related records
Identity
- Identifier
- urn:lemay:boston:entity:the-eliot-oak
- Canonical URL
- https://boston.fyi/work/the-eliot-oak
- As JSON
- https://boston.fyi/work/the-eliot-oak.json
- Version
- 2 · last changed 3 September 2026
Provenance
- Source
- Drake, A Book of New England Legends and Folk Lore (1884) — source of record
- License
- Public domain — published before 1929 (public_domain)
- Retrieved
- 2 September 2026
- Source identifier
- THE ELIOT OAK
- Attribution
- Samuel Adams Drake
- Rights as stated
- Published 1884 and in the public domain in the United States.
Transform ladder
| # | Operation | Description | Tool |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | fetch | retrieved the full text of the collection from its public-domain holding institution | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 2 | segment | split the volume into chapters at its own printed headings; the first occurrence of a heading opens the chapter and later occurrences are the running header, which is discarded | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 3 | corroborate | matched each heading against the book's own table of contents and took the index's spelling as the title; a heading the index does not carry was refused as a caption, a byline, or scanner noise | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 4 | filter | retained the chapters that name a Boston-area place, by the tale's own words | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 5 | normalize | collapsed the scan's line breaks; not one word of the telling was altered, added, or removed | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 6 | withdraw-unattested-setting | The setting recorded on this tale — "Boston and eastern Massachusetts" — is the same string carried by every folklore record in this archive. It is the scope of the collections these tales were drawn from, applied at accession, and not a setting read out of this tale by anyone. It was being served as the source's own wording, which it is not, and on a dozen records the tale printed beside it refuted it. The field is cleared rather than reworded: the archive does not hold a per-tale setting and will not imply one. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |
| 7 | withdraw-unattested-collection-place | The collection place recorded on every telling of this tale — "Boston and eastern Massachusetts" — is the same string carried by every telling in this archive. These tales were compiled from print, not collected from informants in a place, and the field asserted a collection event that did not happen. It is cleared: the teller field already records, correctly, that the collector named no informant, and an absence stated is worth more than a constant that hides it. | archive-ingest 0.1.0 |