The Talking Oaks

by Josephine Neel Wallen

According to legend and myth voices spoke from oak groves to the ancient Greeks and the Druids of Gaul and Britain.

There are oak trees, thousands of them, in Middle Tennessee, but only one man ever claimed to speak their language—and he traveled 1,000 miles to translate the secret tongue.

The talking oaks of this story are probably among the oldest and largest, and certainly the most mysterious, of their kind in Middle Tennessee. There are five of them (once there were six) growing in pairs and about the same distance apart on a hill in Coffee county 12 miles west of Manchester and about 10 miles north of Tullahoma.

The five trees are so old that they deride the white man’s brief stay in those parts. Old timers say their trunks were once scarred by Indian signs that resembled deer prints and these scars were a clue to a lost treasure.

One of the first white men to be impressed with the occult oaks was Duncan Neel, who came from Virginia in 1811 to settle on Duck River. The year was full of ominous signs: an earthquake made the Mississippi River run backwards; a brilliant comet lighted the Tennessee sky; a horde of migrant squirrels overran the county.

But Duncan Neel stayed and chose a home site in the grove of oak trees with the strange signs, the trees whose strange arrangement (were they planted that way deliberately or was Nature in a prankish mood?) is still a matter of conjecture five generations later.

Neel found evidence that the Indians had tended the trees and made a clearing around them. Perhaps the hill, which commands a view of several miles downriver toward Normandy, was a rallying place for the redskins, like the spring at Bell Buckle, Tenn. where the sign of a bell and buckle on a big tree gave that town its name.

The Coffee County pioneer sometimes pondered the meaning of the signs on the oaks but he never dreamed that an interpreter would come forth one day.

The old trees are bent and shorn of their crowns. Their trunks, at a height of five feet, measure as much as 16 feet around. One of the six fell during an ice storm in 1934; its heart was so decayed that an estimate of its annular growth was impossible. An informed guess puts the tree’s age at 400 years.

Duncan Neel’s youngest son, Col. James Neel, was in his 80th year when the traveler came to his door.

“The old oaks told me I was at the right place,” the stranger said.

He was an Indian, proud and imperturbable as the chief on the old penny. The Neels called off the dogs and asked him what he meant by “the right place.”

His father had told him the secret of the oaks, the visitor said and he had vowed to find them. That vow had brought him from the Southwest to Tullahoma by train and the last 10 miles on foot.

The old colonel had never turned a wayfarer from his door and although the dogs continued to bristle and growl, the Indian stayed.

Little by little, over a week’s time, he unfolded the story and all the while he ingratiated himself with the family by making hominy for them and speaking in his own language to delight the children. As he talked, he bargained. For $400 and the cost of his train fare the Indian swore to talk with the oak trees. Their signs would tell him where gold was buried. The gold and the translation of the signs he would give to his white friend.

The skeptical farmer finally came to terms with the Indian. Money changed hands and, like Jason consulting the Speaking Oak, the Indian communed with the trees of his forefathers.

At last he selected one of the oaks and sighted from it to a tree in the nearby spring lot. He pointed to the latter tree and said, “That tree has a mark on it put there by my people. That sign added to what the oaks have told me will give the location of the buried gold.”

To everyone’s astonishment the designated tree did have a mark on it, one never noticed before. The Indian asked the treasure hunters to walk in front of him. They agreed and filed into the woods, following his directions.

To their relief the guide found the spot, deep in the woods, where the cache was alleged to be. “The gold is there,” the Indian muttered, and the hired men went to work with a spade, working harder and faster than ever before.

A deal was a deal to the aged colonel but an old tale flitted through his mind. He remembered having heard that the Cherokees murdered their old chief, Doublehead, because they held him responsible for the sale of their land to the federal government. That had happened five years before the first Neel came into the territory which became Coffee County. The old man wondered whether, more than a century later, this Indian had come like a shadow from the past to settle an old grudge against white men. Was he, Colonel Neel, the instrument of this vengeance?

No trace of any such emotions flickered across the Indian’s face. Rather, his impassivity deepened with the hole in the woods.

But no gold was ever found. The hunters agreed, however, that there was evidence that the earth had been opened at this place before; the fact seemed to lend weight to the Indian’s story.

Perhaps another Indian had learned the secret and reached the treasure before them, the stranger said. “Trees speak the truth about their age and everything else,” he added. Of the truth of his own claim he said not a word.

Soon after, carrying away his wampum and leaving his regrets, the mysterious visitor departed for the West. Whether a hoax was perpetrated or the thicket actually did once shield a hoard of gold only the oak trees know and there is no one left to read their thoughts. Anyway, they are so old now that they are talking only to themselves.

(This article appeared in the Nashville Tennessean Magazine, March 30, 1952)