Ridge Historical Society
Requiem for a Giant
By Carol Flynn
The natural world is as much a part of history as human development. When the white settlers arrived on the Blue Island Ridge, they found a “vast vegetable solitude” that they set about turning into tamed farmlands and landscaped homesteads.
Beverly/Morgan Park has been lucky that so many of the old-growth oak trees that once covered the area remained as a canopy. But these oaks that were here when settlement started almost 200 years ago are now dying off from old age. And no plan was ever made to replace them.
Today the air was filled with the sound of chain saws as another deceased oak giant on the Ridge was cut down. Within the next thirty or so years, the Ridge will lose most of these old giants. The community will look very different for future generations.