For more than two generations, the Lone Tree stood on the highway as a famous landmark. Mrs. Cameron planted the cottonwood seedling in 1881 in the hole left when the original survey stake, set in September 1869 by Levi P. Drake and crew at the corner of the northeast quarter of Section 20, Township 106 North, Range 49 East, was pulled out on land homesteaded by George Cameron in 1880. The tiny seedling grew into a stately tree that served as a beacon in a blizzard, saving the life of teacher Emma Clancy and her twelve children, and later its preservation became the subject of a terrific controversy when a paved highway came beneath its wide-spreading branches. A concrete-created drought around its roots emaciated the tree and caused it to die.