GIANT COUNCIL OAK IS GONE, BUT ITS PRESENCE IS FELT

Orlandoans have long treasured the beautiful old oaks around them, and lore from the city’s early days is rich with reminiscences of a special one, virtually unknown today.

It’s the Council Oak, in its glory said to have been “the largest live oak in all of central and south Florida,” Orlando historian Kena Fries wrote in the 1930s.

“Here it is stated on what seems to be reliable authority,” Fries wrote, the cunning leaders of the Seminoles had planned the Dec. 28, 1835, ambush of Maj. Francis Dade and the slaughter of more than 100 soldiers marching through the pine forest near Bushnell.

“Many other sudden attacks on the early settlers” were planned at the oak tree, Fries wrote. At least that’s how the legend went.

The “authority” may have been Kena Fries’ father, John Otto Fries, one of early Orlando’s most respected figures and a man who knew its landscape, including the Council Oak, like few others.

For many years he was surveyor for Orange County and later a U.S. surveyor. In 1900 he took the first official census of the remaining Seminoles in Florida, on their South Florida reservation.

FROM SWEDEN TO SANFORD

The Swedish son of a distinguished professor of botany at the University of Upsala, Fries also was related to Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus, the “father of botany,” according to a biographical sketch in Eve Bacon’s history of Orlando.

“In 1870 he was seized with the immigration fever,” Bacon wrote, “and sailed from Sweden on the ship Orlando of the Anchor Line. The ship’s name became his talisman,” and Fries headed south, landing at Doyle’s Wharf at Mellonville, now part of Sanford, on Christmas Eve of 1871.

He had come across the ocean and then hundreds of miles in a strange land, but it was the last leg of the journey that nearly did him in.

On the day after Christmas, Fries set out for Orlando with a fellow who agreed to take him and several other passengers for the steep fare of $20 a person.

The mode of transportation was “a two-mule affair with some boards for a body and some boxes for seats,” Bacon says — hardly the 1871 version of a Jeep or even a Mini.

By the time the party got to Longwood, the harness gave out under the strain of the rough roads, and things were at a standstill until the resourceful Fries remembered he had several new pairs of suspenders and shoelaces in his valise.

Using these, he patched together the harness and bumpty-bumped with his compadres into Orlando late in the afternoon.

Finding a room at Lovell’s Hotel, he fortified himself with a meal of fried pork, grits, sweet potatoes, corn bread and black coffee sweetened with molasses.

The next day, Fries looked Orlando over. It must have been hard to reconcile the village of three small stores, a courthouse and few scattered homes with the romance of the name of the ship that had carried him across the Atlantic.

The driver of the haphazard wagon that Fries had saved with his shoelaces offered to take him back to Mellonville, but Fries said no thanks. He headed out walking, the story goes, and reached the port town on the St. Johns River three hours ahead of the buggy.

Fries settled in Oviedo briefly, but in 1873 he brought his family from Sweden, including his daughter Kena. Years later, her book titled Orlando in the Long, Long Ago would tell the story of the city’s early days, beginning with a paean to the Council Oak.

SPECTRAL SURVIVOR

Sometime in the 1880s, the oak was struck down by lightning; a spectral version survives in photos taken about 1910, when an observer noted that “bare ground around trunk indicated branches had spread over one acre.”

By then, vandals had chipped away at the ruin, too, turning the pieces into fence posts and firewood.

For Kena Fries, who died in 1945, the vanished giant was the spiritual core of old Orlando, and she pictured in her history of the city a fragment of the tree she had gleaned on an outing with a friend in 1904 and treasured for decades.

Gazing at the chip of oak, she wrote in the 1930s, she could close her eyes and forget the “swift high-powered cars rushing along brick and asphalt highways, between miles and miles of the Golden Apples of the Hesperides” — groves of oranges.

Under the Council Oak’s spell, she could be transported to the days of the Seminoles.

Kena Fries would no doubt be pleased with the marker the Orange County Historical Commission put up in 1970, by the side of South Fern Creek Avenue in a residential neighborhood, even though few passers-by know it exists and this icon of earlier generations has vanished from the city’s collective memory.

SIGN MARKS LOCATION

It sits unceremoniously between a sidewalk and a mailbox in a neighborhood of homes in the 1950s Florida style: one story, concrete block, clipped lawns, jalousied windows, a vintage TV antenna nearby.

“Nearby in the forest primeval, amid unfolding history,” the marker says, “once stood in majestic beauty the Council Oak, traditional meeting place of the Indian chiefs in the Seminole Indian War.”

Although no records exist of tribal councils at the spot, it is quite likely that at some point, either the Seminoles or early native peoples used the tree as a meeting spot and a landmark, as they did for the giant cypress called The Senator that survives a few miles north in neighboring Seminole County. At more than 3,500 years old, The Senator is one of the most venerable trees in America.

DATEBOOK

To complement its new exhibit, “Florida Remembers World War II,” the Orange County Regional History Center has lined up a variety of programs, including these coming right up:

On Tuesday at 6 p.m., Edmund F. Kallina, chairman of the University of Central Florida history department, will speak on the war’s European theater. This is part of the Second Tuesday lecture series. The cost is $10 per person (military vets are half price with valid ID) or $25 for all three lectures (the remaining ones are on Aug. 12 and Sept. 9).

On Saturday, a free program from 1 to 3 p.m. will focus on “World War II in the Skies.” Jim Clark, UCF history professor and editor of Orlando magazine, will speak at 1 p.m. about British pilots in Florida. Children’s activities are at 2 p.m., followed by a workshop at 3 p.m. on how to preserve your family’s heirlooms from WWII. During the day, World War II airmen will be available at the exhibit to talk about their experiences.

Originally Published: July 6, 2003 at 12:00 AM EDT