THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 4, 1995 TAG: 9506020756
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: GEORGE TUCKER
LENGTH: Medium: 66 lines
The charming story of the ``Wishing Tree,'' a gigantic live oak that dominated what is now the lower Granby Street area for more than 300 years, is one of Norfolk's lesser-known legends.
When the tree was finally felled by the axes of progress on Nov. 7, 1901, hundreds of Norfolkians, who believed their wishes made under its leafy boughs had been fulfilled, deplored its passing.
One of these was Virginia poet Winifred Sackville-Stoner, who memorialized the old tree's demise with a long series of verses supplemented with historical notes. Titled ``A Talisman from The Wishing Oak: The Home of the Fairies,'' the tribute was published by The Nusbaum Book & News Co. at 174 Main St., Norfolk, a few months after the venerable tree was felled.
As far as is known, only one copy of the little green cloth-bound volume survives. Presented by the author to the Norfolk Public Library, it is now a treasure among the rare-books collection of the Kirn Memorial Library's Sargeant Memorial Room.
Touchingly, two withered leaves from the old tree are still attached by thread to pages of the library's copy - ghostly arboreal reminders of the mighty oak that provided an oasis of shade during its long existence.
The tree was already a flourishing sapling in 1682, when Nicholas Wise deeded the first 50-acre site of what is now Norfolk to Capt. William Robinson and Lt. Col. Anthony Lawson, the trustees for Lower Norfolk County. The tree was then out in the country, but the town gradually expanded northward and overtook it.
Soon after the Revolutionary War, when John Boush built a handsome late-Georgian house on the west side of Granby Street between what is now College Place and Tazewell Street, the oak was on his property. When a brick wall was built around the Boush garden, an opening was left at one point in its base for the roots of the then-ancient tree to project into Granby Street. Later, the Boush property was acquired by Virginia Gov. Littleton Waller Tazewell, who lived there until his death in 1860. Meanwhile, the stately old live oak had become a local legend.
There is no record of when it first became known as the ``Wishing Tree.'' Still, two Norfolk traditions are included in Mrs. Sackville-Stoner's historical notes that recount how the name evolved.
The first concerns an elderly early 19th-century citizen who lived in the country north of Norfolk. Every morning, as he walked under the old oak's branches on the way to his office on the Elizabeth River waterfront, the story goes, he would remove his hat and wish for good weather and prosperous business that day. Tradition says the old man claimed that his wishes were always granted. When his story got around, other Norfolkians began frequenting the old oak to try their luck.
The other tale involves a little Norfolk girl of the same era who frequently played with her dolls around the tree's gnarled roots. An imaginative child, she naturally believed in fairies and presumed that the wee folk dwelt among the tree's rustling olive-green leaves.
One day, the little girl saw a gold ring in a jeweler's window, but didn't have the money to buy it. So she asked the tree fairies to get it for her. Soon afterward, an aunt gave her a ring exactly like the one she had seen. When the delighted child expressed her surprise, the aunt said a tiny fairy dressed in oak leaves appeared to her in a dream, showed her a gold ring and told her to buy one like it for her niece.
That apparently did the trick. From then on the ``Wishing Tree'' was a respected Norfolk tradition. by CNB