Moon Tree

The seeds nearly did not make it back. Forest Service chief Ed Cliff asked Stuart Roosa, whom he knew from smokejumping days, to carry seeds on Apollo 14, and Roosa took possibly 2,000 or more of five species around the Moon in 1971. The bags burst open during decontamination and the seeds were first thought dead. Germination worked anyway, and in 1975 and 1976 seedlings went to state forestry agencies for the Bicentennial. Elmer's tree was planted in April 1976; two New Orleans moon trees have since died.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Valentine Lake Recreation Area — 4.4 mi
  A 46-acre Kisatchie National Forest lake dug by Civilian Conservation Corps crews in the 1930s, with a campground and the head of the Wild Azalea Trail.
• Kent Plantation House — 14 mi
  Rapides Parish's oldest known standing building, a Creole house with a February tour and a 2023 memorial that put the enslaved first.
• Epps House: Solomon Northup's Gateway to Freedom — 16 mi
  The Creole cottage Solomon Northup helped build for the man who enslaved him, moved twice and now a small museum on the LSU Alexandria campus.
• Arna Bontemps African American Museum — 16 mi
  The restored Alexandria house where the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps was born in 1902, on the Louisiana African American Heritage Trail.

More markers nearby

• Camp Packard - Company 1446 — 4.6 mi
• Camp Claiborne (Birthplace of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions) — 11 mi
• Training At Camp Claiborne / Life At Camp Claiborne — 12 mi
• African-American Soldiers at Camp Claiborne — 12 mi