A couple miles northwest of McBaine, alone in a field with nothing else within a thousand feet of it, stands a tree old enough to have been a full-grown giant when Lewis and Clark passed within sight of it in 1804. It’s Missouri’s largest bur oak, tied for the biggest of its kind in the country, and it’s still just standing there in a Boone County farm field, doing what it’s done for the better part of four hundred years.
How old, how big
The Williamson Bur Oak — officially named for the family that has farmed the land around it for six generations — is estimated at 350 to 400 years old, meaning the acorn it grew from likely dropped sometime around 1640. Its trunk measures 287 inches around; it stands roughly 90 feet tall with a 130-foot crown spread, according to the National Park Service, which tracks it as a site along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail because the expedition would have passed within a half-mile of it. It’s Missouri’s state champion bur oak and shares the national champion title with a tree in Kentucky.
How to see it
The tree stands on private farmland, so seeing it means respecting that it’s someone’s working ground, not a park. From Columbia, take Providence Road south until it becomes Route K, follow Route K west into McBaine, and continue as the road becomes Burr Oak Road; the tree is about two miles northwest of town, on the right. Cyclists on the Katy Trail can reach it too — it sits roughly a fifth of a mile south of the trail near mile marker 170.7, visible off to the south as you ride between Huntsdale and McBaine. However you arrive, stay off the exposed roots, don’t climb it or carve into it, and keep to the road shoulder. The tree has already survived vandalism once, and the family that owns the land has been generous about public visits for a long time — it’s worth not giving them a reason to reconsider.
What it’s survived
The tree carries scars from nearly everything Missouri weather can throw at it. It rode out the catastrophic floods of 1993 and 1995 that reshaped the river bottoms around it, and it’s been struck by lightning more than once. The most serious hit came on the morning of October 23, 2020, when lightning split the north side of the trunk and set it smoking; the Boone County Fire Protection District spent the morning putting out the fire and stabilizing the tree. Landowner John Sam Williamson told reporters at the time that the tree had been struck before and he expected it to pull through. It did. Arborists now check on it regularly to manage the wear that comes with hundreds of visitors a year.
A tree the county officially loves
In August 2021, Boone County made the bur oak its only tree with an official historic site designation. A Facebook group dedicated to it has drawn more than 10,000 followers who post photos through every season, and the tree has become, as one local writer put it, one of the “main sentries” of the McBaine bottoms — still standing nearly four centuries in. People drive out from Columbia just to stand under it.
Why bur oaks get this big
Part of what let this one survive four centuries is the species itself. According to the Missouri Department of Conservation, bur oaks grow thick, deeply grooved, corky bark that insulates them against fire — a trait that let them dominate Missouri’s old tallgrass prairies and oak savannas, standing scattered and fire-hardened while grass fires swept past underneath. Their acorns are unmistakable: a deep, shaggy-edged cap covering more than half the nut, which is where the tree gets its other common name, mossycup oak. Standing under the McBaine tree, with leaves the width of your forearm, it’s not hard to believe it’s been doing this since before Missouri was a state.
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