The Cleveland Oak

Two oaks in this corner of Louisiana claim the same president. Here, family tradition says Grover Cleveland hugged the trees while staying in 1891 with his friend, the actor Joe Jefferson. On Jefferson Island, Rip Van Winkle Gardens counts a 550-year-old oak that Cleveland is said to have slept under, at the house Jefferson built about 1870. Both stories begin with a visit to Jefferson, and both are traditions rather than records. This one, the marker says, is more than 300 years old and about 23 feet around.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Jungle Gardens and Avery Island — 0.4 mi
  A 170-acre garden and wildfowl refuge on a Gulf Coast salt dome, founded by Edward Avery McIlhenny, on an island that was a Marsh sugar plantation worked by enslaved people before Tabasco and the 1862 salt works.
• Shadows-on-the-Teche — 9.1 mi
  A National Trust site in New Iberia built 1831 to 1834 for sugar planters David and Mary Weeks, now interpreted around the 1,112 people the Weeks family enslaved, among them Charity Polk, Amos, Patty, Isaac and Louisa.
• Cypremort Point State Park — 12 mi
  A 185-acre Vermilion Bay park reached by road, with a half-mile man-made beach, a marsh boardwalk, shore fishing and a boat launch, and a Chitimacha tradition of a great cypress here.
• St. Martin de Tours Catholic Church — 16 mi
  The Mother Church of the Acadians, founded in 1765 on St. Martin Square in St. Martinville, with a late 1870s Lourdes grotto and, a block away, the Evangeline Oak on Bayou Teche.

More markers nearby

• Bird City — 0.4 mi
• McIlhenny — 0.4 mi
• Bayou Petite Anse — 0.7 mi
• Avery Island Salt Dome — 0.8 mi