BUCKET LIST UPDATE – No. 111: Visit the Old Flag Tree site at Old Town

Old Flag Tree Historical Marker at Old Town

The first that I can remember ever hearing about Conecuh County’s “Old Flag Tree” was several years ago when I read a reference to it in an old issue of The Evergreen Courant newspaper. According to that edition of the newspaper, which was dated Jan. 28, 1988, an historical marker had been placed that week at the site of the Old Flag Tree, which was a well-known Conecuh County landmark in the 19th Century. The tree no longer stands, but I’ve wanted to visit this historical marker for some time, and I placed this field trip on my “bucket list” earlier this year.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Old Flag Tree, it was located in what is now the Old Town community and was at the site of an Indian battleground. It had a distinctive look to it because all of the branches on one side had been torn away, causing the tree to look like a flag from a distance. The site was later owned by the Stallworth family and was on the original Sparta Road that ran from Travis Bridge to the Old Sparta community.

In Chapter Eight of “The History of Conecuh County, Alabama,” author Benjamin Franklin Riley discusses the Old Flag Tree in a section dedicated to the history of the Old Town community. According to Riley, white settlers first began to live in the Old Town community between 1820 and 1822 and at that time “the chief object of attraction, to the early white settlers, was a memorable tree, which still stands (in 1881) as a source of wonder to the passerby and is known by the familiar name of the ‘Old Flag Tree.’ Its name is derived from the banner-like shape of its branches at the top. For six or eight feet, the trunk is utterly bare of branches, when they assume the shape of a flag by growing in a single direction. There was a tradition among the early white settlers to the effect that this towering tree was a signal to the Indian traders passing from the Chattahoochee to Pensacola, as it was to all the bands prowling through the country.”

The tree was last known to be standing in 1912. Hugh ‘Dot’ Mason was instrumental in erecting the historical marker at the Old Flag Tree site, which today sits less than half a mile off of U.S. Highway 84, down Old Town Church Road. On Sunday afternoon, my son and I set out to see this historical marker for ourselves, and it wasn’t hard to find. Of course, nothing of the tree remains today, so you’re left to your imagination as to what it must have looked like.

In the end, how many of you have ever visited the Old Flag Tree site? What did you think about it? Do you know anything else about the Old Flag Tree? Do you know any stories about it? Let us know in the comments section below.