The Martin Luther King, Jr. Grove brings together memorial plantings linked to people, places, and events in American history, including a sycamore associated with Brown Chapel AME in Selma, Alabama, where Martin Luther King, Jr. made civil rights speeches; an Antietam sycamore recalling the Civil War battle at Antietam Creek in Maryland on September 17, 1862, when 23,000 lives were lost; an Andersonville southern magnolia honoring those held at the notorious Confederate prison in Georgia; a Harriet Beecher Stowe white ash from the Cincinnati, Ohio home of the anti-slavery author of Uncle Tom's Cabin; a Washington Irving sycamore from Sunnyside in Tarrytown, New York, tied to the Vann Tassel family of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow; a Frederick Douglass osage orange from his home in Washington, DC; a ginkgo from Bartram’s Garden, the oldest surviving botanical garden in the United States, founded in 1728 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; a sycamore descended from trees at George Washington's Mount Vernon estate; an Andrew Jackson southern magnolia recalling the White House tree he planted in memory of his wife Rachel; a National Champion crape myrtle transplanted in 1920 at the Neal house in McIntosh, Florida; Tidal Basin cherry trees in Washington, DC, given by Japanese Emperor Mutsuhito and the Tokyo Municipal Council, with the first planted by Mrs. William Howard Taft on March 29, 1912; a Minuteman red maple tied to Concord, Massachusetts, where colonial citizen soldiers first met the British in battle on April 19, 1775; a sweetgum grown from a seed collected at Elvis Presley's Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee; a Frank Lloyd Wright ginkgo from his Forest Avenue home in Oak Park, Illinois; a River Farm redbud from the Potomac River site where George Washington supervised construction of Mount Vernon; and a Stephen Foster live oak grown from an acorn collected at Stephen Foster State Park in White Springs, Florida.