According to legend, University of Georgia professor William Jackson lived across Dearing Street from an oak tree, which he often climbed as a child and grew to love. This attachment, so the story goes, prompted Jackson to deed to the tree the land on which it grew. Jackson did live near the oak for four years as a young married man, but he had actually grown up in nearby Jefferson County. On August 12, 1890, the story of the tree first appeared in an unsigned article in the Athens Weekly Banner, and A.L. Hull recounted the legend in his 1906 edition of Annals of Athens. When a 1942 storm brought the old tree down, one of its acorns was saved by the Junior Ladies Garden Club, who tended the sprout and planted the sapling on the original site in 1946.