The Zollie Tree

After Confederate General Felix Zollicoffer was fatally wounded at the Battle of Mill Springs on January 19, 1862, his men placed his body under a white oak tree that became known as the Zollie Tree. For forty years, no effort was made to remember or honor Zollicoffer or the Confederate soldiers buried in a nearby mass grave. In 1902, ten-year-old Dorotha Burton saw the Memorial Day ceremonies for Union soldiers buried in Mill Springs National Cemetery and recognized that the Confederate dead nearby had been largely forgotten. That year she decorated the Zollie Tree with a flower-entwined evergreen wreath and placed flowers on the mass grave, continuing the Memorial Day tradition until 1947, when arthritis disabled her, and her family continues it. On June 9, 1995, a severe storm destroyed the original tree. Arborists judged it, then almost ninety feet tall and fifteen feet in circumference, to be between 200 and 250 years old. On Memorial Day 1996, the Mill Springs Battlefield Association planted a young white oak grown as a seedling of the original tree.

Kentucky · United States