Truth behind the tree
Fairchild Oak's history, name a mix of myth, fact
By DEREK CATRON
Norman Harwood was a big man, heavyset and so tall he had to stoop to walk through most doorways.
His neighbors never took to him. Rumors of unpaid debts, jail time and cattle thieving swirled about him. His death inspired tales of poison and a haunting.
Though he lived in the Halifax area just five years, he left a legacy: a two-story, board-and-batten house and an even bigger tree that bore his name for decades. The house stood more than a hundred years before it was torn down. The tree still stands.
In the end, though, he would lose that, too.
A tree by any name
The tree stands alone at the edge of a large clearing. You could find a live oak taller than its 68 feet, but a trunk about 24 feet around and a crown of branches stretching out more than twice its height imbues it with a certain presence.
This is a tree worthy of a name.
In the shade of the tree, a bronze plaque set within a large coquina block dedicates it to the memory of the renowned botanist David Fairchild, who helped bring the flowering cherry trees to Washington, D.C.
How the tree got Fairchild's name is a story as tangled as its gnarled branches, interweaving the lives of Harwood, Fairchild and a local woman with a drive to preserve natural treasures.
Separating fact from myth where the Fairchild Oak is concerned has never been easy, though.
A touch of myth can even be found in the plaque, which proclaims that the tree "gladdened man's heart for 2,000 years," though arborists working for the state later pegged a more realistic estimate at 300 to 400 years.
That makes the oak a relative newcomer; archaeologists have found Native American artifacts on the site dating back to approximately 2,000 B.C.
Relatively high and dry, with rich soil and two small springs nearby that flow year-round, the land was a natural choice for early settlers, including James Ormond, who came around 1800 and built a house just a stone's throw from the tree. The family abandoned the site in 1829 after the death of James Ormond II, whose tomb can be found at Ormond Tomb Park.
When Norman Harwood bought the land in 1880, he built his home near the shade of the great oak.
A mysterious death in Florida
Norman Harwood's death was such big news it merited at least two stories in the New York Times. One, published May 26, 1885, described the "sensation" it created because of Harwood's life insurance valued at $200,000 -- well over $4 million in today's dollars -- and speculation that it was a suicide motivated by debt.
Born to a wealthy family, Harwood ran a dry goods business with some 500 employees in Minneapolis. He was thriving until an economic crash left him $1.7 million in debt, according to the Times account.
Harwood came to Florida from Minneapolis about 1880 and bought 4,000 acres that included the old Ormond plantation. According to one account a contemporary wrote, "It was generally understood that when Harwood came to Florida he had left his conscience and a pile of debts in Minnesota."
Despite his financial difficulties, Harwood's ambitions remained as big as his size 13 shoes and made-to-order suits and hats.
Historical accounts say he employed 25 white men and 125 black men. They planted an orange grove in 1881 and grew sugarcane, corn and sweet potatoes that were taken to St. Augustine in mule-drawn wagons to be sold. Another account told of Harwood's hopes to capitalize on Henry Flagler's railroad. An optimistic old map shows a town of Harwood and a Harwood Station just north of Ormond.
A reckoning was coming, though. Harwood's creditors hadn't given up, and he'd made enemies among his neighbors.
One local story tells of a scam in which locals sold Harwood $2,500 worth of cattle in intervals. Before each new delivery, some of the cattle in Harwood's pens would disappear. By the end of the contract, he had two cows to show for his investment.
The story is reversed in another version, which has a neighbor realizing he's been duped by Harwood after recognizing a cow with a distinctively twisted horn. In that telling, Harwood was placed in a cistern near the giant oak until he agreed to pay the money.
Harwood's only escape from debt came in death, and it's here the stories begin to converge.
One poignant account in local historian Alice Strickland's "Ormond on the Halifax" described Harwood's last night. He spoke at length with his German housekeeper and her husband, and then "in a most unusual gesture, shook hands with both of them."
He was found dead the next morning in the long bed that had been specially designed for him. He was 56. There were rumors of poison, but the doctors' report was "hushed up" and the family collected the insurance money and moved to Atlanta.
For the next 75 years, the tree would be known as the Harwood Oak or sometimes the Haunt Oak among those who liked a good ghost story.
A determined woman
When Hal Butts remembers his late mother, he pictures her on the telephone, undoubtedly working on a cause.
"This is Eileen Butts," she would announce. "Butts, like cigarette butts."
She stood just 5 feet, 2 inches but was blessed with outsized energy -- and drive. "She was a live wire," Hal Butts recalled.
She would help preserve the Bulow Plantation Ruins and create Tomoka State Park while serving on the state parks board, which she chaired in 1951. Later, she led the fundraising drive to build the Ormond Memorial Art Museum & Gardens.
Asked how she got so much done, she replied, "I never worked with committees."
Butts was also an amateur botanist who collected thousands of Florida wildflower specimens. Meeting David Fairchild must have been a thrill.
Fairchild was a botanist Indiana Jones would have admired. Born in 1869, he traveled the world studying rare and exotic plants, introducing many useful species to the United States, including soybeans, nectarines and mangoes. He later moved to South Florida and the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables is named for him.
Fairchild -- whose wife, Marian, was the daughter of inventor Alexander Graham Bell -- often stopped in Ormond Beach on his way south. In later years, Butts -- who died in 1991 in her 95th year -- would tell the story of when she'd first brought Fairchild to see the oak.
"Eileen, you've got to save it," he told her.
She did -- with his unwitting help.
The land had been purchased by the Lehigh Portland Cement Co., which valued the property for its vast deposits of coquina rock. Butts wrote to the company, encouraging the new owners to preserve historic spots, including the oak.
Saving a tree named for a man of dubious repute might have been a tough sell. It's unclear if Butts even tried. Instead, she lobbied that they save a tree she connected with the botanist who'd brought cherry trees to the nation's capital.
"She thought to give it a more distinctive name," her son, Bill Butts recalled. "With a famous naturalist, people would want to preserve it. I think that was the idea, to keep it for posterity."
"I think she was showing some of her amazing ability to be perceptive," said her eldest son, Hal Butts.
The strategy worked. The company set aside the oak for protection and agreed to erect the plaque. A dedication ceremony took place on a Sunday, Dec. 11, 1955, a year after Fairchild's death. The account in the next day's News-Journal made no mention of Harwood, even though his house stood less than 20 yards away.
The house is gone now, torn down more than 20 years ago after the state acquired the land and felt the unstable structure posed a hazard. As Harwood's claim to the land has diminished, Fairchild's has grown stronger.
If you walk up to the tree today, you'll find growing on the slope behind it a cluster of bamboo.
The bamboo didn't grow there in Harwood's time. It couldn't; the species wasn't introduced in the United States until the 20th century.
The man who introduced it? David Fairchild.