Holy Oak
When William Randolph Hearst stuck his nose into Monterey's business, and how a famous tree ended up dumped in the bay
By Joe Livernois
FAMOUS TREES? NOTABLE TREES? California has quite a few. Behold Methuselah, for instance. The little bristlecone in the White Mountains might be the oldest tree on the planet; it was but a little sprout at the start of the Bronze Age, about 4,800 years ago. California also boasts the portly General Sherman tree in King’s Canyon. Giant Sequoias and redwoods are everywhere in this state. Drivers with a weird desire to maneuver their vehicles through big trees can fulfill their wishes on the Redwood Coast.
California’s greatest trees are impressive monuments to Grand Nature.
But let’s not forget Monterey’s own Holy Oak, the quercus agrifolia that European conquerors made famous. The tree is the Plymouth Rock of the West Coast. It provided the shaded backdrop for a story or two about the founding of California.
We are asked to revere that venerable tree as both a religious relic and a historical curiosity. The Holy Oak overlooked the Monterey Bay — great view from there! — and it was under that tree that both Sebastián Vizcaíno, the Spanish explorer, and the besainted Junipero Serra celebrated their arrivals in Monterey with ceremonies and rites and masses and meals of thanksgiving, before staking territorial claims on behalf of civilized society.
For a while, the tree was known as the “Junipero Oak,” in honor of Serra. Maybe it still is, I don’t know, but I prefer “Holy Oak” because it rolls off the tongue. Also, my upbringing in the Roman Catholic tradition cautioned me against referring to priests by their first names. “Junipero Oak” seems like a breach of Catholic propriety.
Whatever you call it, the Holy Oak is dead now, no longer alive by its roots. Several wood chunks remain and a couple of them were repurposed as chairs created by a local craftsman many decades ago. The chairs were the handiwork of Ichiro Noda, and they can be viewed, like the bones of a saint, at local institutions.
(I mean no disrespect to Noda, but the chairs don’t look all that comfortable. It’s as though they were designed to inflict torturous penance: Your sins are forgiven, my son; say five ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘10 Hail Marys’ … oh, and go sit on that torture chair for 20 minutes.)
And where exactly in Monterey was that splendid tree located? You might be able to find the spot, but first you’d have to figure out how to navigate through Monterey and into a hidden lower corner just beyond Lower Presidio Historic Park to a wooded glen called "Serra’s Landing.” Good luck with that. Clever geocaching skills might help, but don’t count on it.
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ACCORDING TO HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS, Vizcaíno and Serra gathered with their fellow travelers and local natives under and around the tree — presumably it was easier to find back then — to celebrate their good fortune. Vizcaíno arrived in 1602, landing in Monterey with three small vessels to stake a claim for the King of Spain.
Serra showed up about 168 years later, after initiating his mission to colonize Alta California in San Diego. He joined up with explorer Gaspar de Portolá in Monterey, to discover that the Holy Oak was still there. The ceremonies under the tree were attended with much pomp. Serra’s mass was worthy of a saint.
“On the 3d of June, being the holy day of Pentecost, the whole of the officers of sea and land, and all of the people assembled on a bank at the foot of an oak, where we caused an altar to be erected, and the bells rung,” Serra confided in a letter to a colleague, describing the happy event. And what a grand assemblage it must have been! The celebrants chanted the “Veni Creator,” Serra blessed the water, his men erected a great cross and hoisted the royal standard, and Serra “chanted the first mass that was ever performed in this place.“ He didn’t just say mass. He chanted it.
Good stuff, but it gets better. Serra continued:
“After this the officers took possession of the country in the name of the King, our Lord, whom God preserved. We then all dined together in a shady place on the beach; the whole ceremony being accompanied by many volleys and salutes by the troops and vessels.”
Father's Serra's Landing Place or Celebration of the First Mass (oil on canvas), unsigned, attributed to Léon Trousset.
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THE REST IS HISTORY — a history subject to constant debate: The military and the monks certainly made their mark, and along the way they decimated the native populations. These days, modern attitudes about man’s inhumanity to man, about cruelty and intent, are now used as judgment against the righteousness of the Spaniards’ accomplishments. (As it should be, in my opinion.)
Still, their invasion set in motion California’s destiny and it got us where we are today, for better or for worse.
In any case, a couple of centuries following Serra’s death a priest in Monterey named Raymond Mestres made it his mission to preserve the Holy Oak as a religious/historic public monument. The tree wasn’t much to look at, and it certainly wasn’t the majestic landmark described in the historic accounts — a bolt of lightning split the thing in half sometime in the mid 1800s. It was a shell of itself by the time Mestres roamed this mortal coil. Still, Mestres hastened to memorialize the Holy Oak.
At the turn of the century, bumbling civilization finished off what the lightning bolt started. It all began when the city of Monterey set up an embankment for a project to extend Pacific Street. Their work dammed up a stream adjoining the tree. The pooling water threatened to drown the oak.
Worse yet, a couple of entrepreneurs were bidding to purchase the property. They hoped to build a saloon catering to the soldiers encamped at the nearby Presidio.
The proposal to desecrate this holy spot with a den of iniquity propelled Mestres into a frenzy of exertions. He didn’t have the funds to purchase the land out from under the saloon keepers, and his preservation efforts apparently didn’t interest the local diocese. In 1902, the priest wheedled a local banker, T.J. Field, into buying the property with the promise that he wouldn’t sell it to the saloon keepers. Field would hold the property in a sort of informal trust until someone got serious about immortalizing the location with the public protection Mestres thought it deserved.
Also, city crews dug a culvert to improve drainage around the oak, thinking that would help preserve the tree.
Things were looking up.
Enter William Randolph Hearst, who barged in to Monterey with big promises. Hearst needs no introduction, of course. We all know he built a splendid castle with the lucre he amassed peddling tawdry sensationalism and crude exaggerations in the newspapers he published. Whether he was furnishing a war or saving historical landmarks, Hearst promoted himself as the hero his readers never knew they needed until he told them. If there wasn’t a sled named Rosebud in the castle attic, there should have been.
Hearst was always looking for any angle that would make him seem human to the grubby masses. At one point he amused himself with an historic-preservation kick. Perhaps taking a cue from the great Ben C. Truman, who I wrote about recently, Hearst went on a rampage about the ongoing neglect and deterioration of California’s great old buildings and locations. He cast a special gaze along the Central Coast.
In 1903 his San Francisco Examiner promoted a reader-funded campaign to purchase and save a number of forgotten historical sites, including the Holy Oak property. The other Monterey places he hoped to rescue from the clutches of benign indifference included the First Theater, the Custom House, the old home of General Tecumseh Sherman (who, as mentioned above, got a big tree named after him), the so-called Robert Louis Stevenson house and the House of Four Winds.
Hearst rallied his readers to contribute their dollars to what he called the “Landmarks Fund.” The Examiner carried daily updates on the fund’s growth, while congratulating readers for their civic interest in preserving the state’s monuments.
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HEARST AND HIS NEWSROOM LACKEYS spared no enthusiasm in describing the tree as a fantastic subject of myth and legend. “Viscaino Oak Withstands the Winds of Two Thousand Years,” read one breathless headline over a story promoting the campaign. “The world has few living monuments of such antiquity and widespread interest as the oak under which stood the earlier white men who landed on the shores of California,” read the story, published May 4, 1903. “The tree was ancient, probably almost as old-looking as it is now, when Viscaino stood under it nearly a generation before the landing of the Pilgrims on the Atlantic coast.”
Another Examiner story claimed the tree was “the oldest living landmark in the United States.” As far as significant American lodestars go, according to Hearst, the Holy Oak predated Plymouth Rock.
On July 18, 1903, the Examiner devoted nearly an entire page to the happy news that Hearst had successfully purchased the Junipero/Viscaino/Holy Oak and surrounding property, thanks to the generosity of his readers. “ONE MORE LANDMARK IS SAVED FOR THE PEOPLE” read the headline. (The main story was accompanied by garrulous declarations from a half-dozen Monterey officials about the agreeable turn of events, with obligatory expressions of gratitude that William Randolph Hearst had saved the day.)
The official record shows that Hearst purchased the property from Field. Field told an Examiner reporter that the would-be saloon keepers had offered him $2,000 for the property, a full $700 more than Hearst’s bid, but he was obliged to make good on his promise to Mestres.
Mestres quickly erected a monument on the site with a marker that looked more like a gravestone. The monument referred to "The Junipero Oak" and it commemorated "the ceremony of taking possession of California" that was "enacted by Father Junipero Serra under the shade of this tree."
Then, within months after Hearst’s bluster and laud, the tree was all but forgotten. It wasn’t long before the Holy Oak succumbed to the flooding caused by the botched public works design; bad drainage caused its roots to rot. A public works crew pulled up the dead thing and unceremoniously dumped it into the Monterey Bay. Someone must have had a WTF moment and realized that discarding a holy relic into the cold blue waters of the Pacific was a sacrilege. A venial sacrilege, perhaps, but a sacrilege nonetheless.
What happened next is sort of fuzzy: After some sleuthing, crews got a sense of where the tree might have be. Local fisherman somehow discovered it — I’ve read it was 3 miles from shore and I’ve also read it was up to 12 miles out. The fishermen pulled in the main trunk from its watery grave. A businessman and philanthropist named Harry Greene preserved the sodden stump and commissioned Noda to fashion the aforementioned chairs from its branches. That’s how the story goes, anyway.
Greene, remembered in Monterey as a “pioneer local citizen and a tree lover of international note,” then donated another oak to replace the Holy Oak. A great ceremony was held in 1932 to celebrate the new growth.
Alas!, oak trees come and oak trees go, and Harry Greene’s Holy Oak apparently didn’t survive. But the site today is in public ownership, as Mestres hoped it would. Serra’s Landing State Historic Park is tucked away, hidden in plain site, off that little jag from Pacific Street as Pacific approaches “The Curve” at Lighthouse Avenue.
Some of the stump is now stored behind the San Carlos Basilica in Monterey, and one of the chairs is at the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum. Another can be found on display at the Japanese American Citizens League building in Monterey. A limb from the tree is also on display at the Carmel Mission.
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Postscript:
The Rev. Raymond Mestres, the former pastor of the Capilla Real de San Carlos, was a real presence around the Monterey Peninsula (see photo, below). His ongoing promotion of Junipero Serra included a historical drama he wrote and directed to commemorate the bicentennial of the missionary's death. The play was staged at Forest Theater in 1913.
Mestres, who died in 1930 at the age of 66, is also known for officiating over the marriage of Herbert Hoover and Lou Henry at Miss Henry's home in Monterey. This happened more than 30 years before Hoover was elected president. Neither bride nor groom were Catholics, but Mestres had been a long-time friend of the Henry family.
There’s a great video of the late great Huell Howser’s visit with Dave Schaechtele, state parks official, that describes the life and times of the Holy Oak. It can be viewed here, starting at the 8:20 mark.
If you’re still trying to find the Serra’s Landing State Historic Park, good luck.
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Author’s note: A very different version of this story appeared previously in a Patreon newsletter I circulated last year. Also, this story was corrected after its previous post to correct T.J. Field’s name and to include Jeff Rothal as a source.
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Sources:
San Francisco Examiner (various dates)
Monterey Peninsula Herald (various dates)
The San Francisco Call (1895)
City of Monterey
Monterey County Historical Society
”A Tree and a Chair,” Jeff Rothal, Pacific Grove Museum of Natural History, June 12, 2015
Carmel Mission Foundation
A very nice summary of the history of the Holy Oak. Thank you.
The chair, made by Japanese National, Ichiro Noda circa, 1908, now resides at the Monterey JACL Heritage Center/Museum