Bearing witness to history
Oak tree made famous in movies has its final act
Even in death, the Witness Tree looked alive.
With twin trunks and a regal crown of tangled branches, the gigantic valley oak stood in the middle of Hollywood’s Paramount Ranch for at least a century.
It witnessed the making of silent movies and TV westerns, fake gunfights and real car crashes. It saw Bob Hope in Caught in the Draft and Sandra Bullock in The Lake House. And it witnessed weddings and parties too, hosting hundreds of guests beneath its leafy outstretched branches.
But early on the morning of Nov. 9, 2018, it witnessed something frightening. The flames of Southern California’s Woolsey Fire ravaged the Santa Monica Mountains, taking out a stand of willow trees before surging onto Paramount Ranch. The entire Western Town’s Main Street, recently the set of HBO’S Westworld, burned to the ground.
The tree’s bark was charred black. Its bare branches looked spindly and skeletal. Yet despite all the destruction around it, the Witness Tree was still standing.
The National Park Service, which oversees the historic movie ranch, kept hoping that the tree would come back to life. But last month, arborists visited the tree to make a prognosis, Ana Beatriz Cholo, a National Park Service spokeswoman, told The Washington Post.
They declared the beloved tree dead.
No one quite knows how old the Witness Tree was. Given its size, 100 inches in diameter at breast height, Cholo said the park’s plant specialists believe the tree is likely more than 100 years old.
It witnessed the settlement of Paramount Pictures in 1927, when the company purchased 2,700 acres of what was then called Rancho Las Virgenes, a former Spanish land grant. In the ensuing years, the ranch would be transformed into a cascade of distinct worlds, ranging from colonial Massachusetts in the Maid of Salem to ancient China in The Adventures of Marco Polo, according to the Park Service.
Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Marlene Dietrich, Elvis Presley and Sylvester Stallone starred in films on the set.
The ranch’s western-themed heyday would arrive in the ’50s, in the glory days of the TV cowboy. William Hertz, an entrepreneur, bought a portion of the land not far from the first Ronald Reagan Ranch. There, he built a new Western Town out of old Paramount prop storage sheds and studio buildings.
With dusty streets and mountains in the backdrop, the revitalized ranch would become the set for popular westerns including The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke and, much later, the ’90s drama Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
The Park Service ultimately bought the site in 1980, opening it to the public.
Only a few buildings survived the blaze, including a stately white church built for Westworld and a train station from Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Debris still litters the landscape, and a chainlink fence surrounds the decaying Witness Tree.