The Adventures of Robin Hood | Hooker Oak Recreation Area — the Gallows Oak that blew down in 1977

In the film Robin gathers his outlaws under a huge tree the script calls the Gallows Oak, and everyone in Chico knows which tree that was supposed to be. The Hooker Oak stood here — a valley oak that Annie Bidwell named in 1887 for the English botanist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker. It was nearly a hundred feet tall and twenty-nine feet around at eight feet from the ground, and its longest limb ran a hundred and eleven feet from trunk to tip. For decades the town billed it as the largest oak in the world.

Whether it is the tree on screen has been argued locally for as long as anyone has cared. The Chico historian John Nopel spent years insisting it is not. The claim survives anyway, partly because it is the better story and partly because the tree had earned one.

It came down in a windstorm on 1 May 1977. The state marker set at the site estimates it was over a thousand years old. California Historical Landmark 313 stands at 1928 Manzanita Avenue, between Vallombrosa and Hooker Oak Avenue, and a children's playground now occupies the ground the canopy used to shade.

Find the marker, then walk twenty-nine feet in a circle where the trunk was. Nothing on film and nothing on the plaque gives you that number the way your own feet do.

Photo: the Hooker Oak, c.1910 postcard, Wikimedia Commons.