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A barge is seen floating down the St. Johns River under the Memorial Bridge on Saturday.
Folks glancing toward the St. Johns River on Friday evening and Saturday morning may have caught an unusual sight: Three fully grown oak trees, floating down the river on a barge.
One might have wondered, "Hmm, how did these three trees find themselves floating along the St. Johns this weekend?"
Ellen Lewis, public relations and marketing manager for Texas-based Environmental Design, Inc., knew the answer. The company she works for moves trees — sometimes significantly massive trees — all across the country. One of the firm's clients up in Jacksonville has an early-1900s-era "plantation" and wanted three old oaks for the property, Lewis said.
The roughly 150-year-old trees grew up on Rodeheaver Boys Ranch, said Lewis. And, while their journey downriver only began Friday afternoon, the process to get the trio out of the ground, onto a 54-foot-wide, 180-foot-long barge and onto the river for a 52-nautical-mile trek took a lot longer.
"We started digging them out two months ago," Lewis said Friday. "It took them just about 11 hours (Thursday) to get them on the barge."
Lewis claims Environmental Designs is the only firm around that could perform this particular service. Photos from the company's website show massive pines being lifted out of the ground.
The crews began rolling the 29- to-32-foot-wide root balls of each 30- to 32-diameter trunk with what Lewis called a patented airbag method, since they each had to traverse a steep incline to make it onto the 12-foot-high barge. She said the crews began around 2 p.m. Thursday and did not complete the task until 1 in the morning.
The barge began its journey downstream — on the only river in North America that flows north — around 2 p.m. Friday. It stopped and docked in East Palatka, just south of Memorial Bridge overnight. Lewis said this was a choice made by the barge captain to make the remainder of the journey in daylight, for safety. The trees — which Lewis estimates weighed a combined 750,000 pounds — restarted their river cruise Saturday morning, crossing under the bridge around 7:30 a.m. and arrived at their Jacksonville destination late Saturday afternoon, Lewis said.
People who saw the traveling foliage over the weekend were surprised and largely amused. It's not every day one sees a triplet of massive oaks moving together — let alone floating.
At the oaks' estimated ages, that means that they may have been seedlings soon after Putnam County was first established and thin sticks when Ulysses S. Grant was president. The trees may have been saplings in The Panic of 1873 and just younguns during the banking collapse in the 1930s became known as the Great Depression. They would have survived Florida's "Great Freeze" of 1894.
Some folks on social media said they wished the trees well on their northern trip — wherever they ended up.
Lewis said she could not divulge the name of her client, the precise destination of the trees or the costs involved in moving them. But she did say why the client wanted the oaks.
When asked, "Why not just plant three smaller oaks and watch them grow?", Lewis said the client did not have any very large trees on his property, but had the resources to get them.
"He has enough money to buy time," Lewis said.
Editor's note: An earlier version of this article inaccurately estimated the combined weight of the trees at 250,000 lbs. The company estimates the trees weighed approximately 250,000 lbs each. The article has been updated.