An urban relic of the presettlement bur oak savanna
Mineral Point Road, from Gammon Road west to the
Beltline, travels through one of the most heavily commercial areas in Madison.
Which is why it is so startling to see, at the corner of High Point Road, a large
grove of bur oaks. I have been intrigued by this grove for many years and have now
found time to look into their origin.
Photo looking across High Point Road toward Mineral Point Road. There are about a dozen large bur oaks here. |
Realizing that such a grove hinted at oak savanna, I
accessed the original surveyor's records for
this area. Sure enough, this is a classic bur oak savanna, as the surveyor’s
notes indicate.
Public Land Survey, Interior field notes, Dec. 1834, Orson
Lyon surveyor
T7N R8E
North between Sections 22 and 23
Bur oak 9 inches diameter
40.00 Set quarter section post between White Oak 30 N69W42
and Bur oak 14 S14W65
40 91 Bur oak 12 inches diameter
70 70 Bur oak 12 inches diameter
80 00 Set post corner to Sections 14 15 22 23 bearings
Bur Oak 14 S83 E33
Ditto N 57 W 52
Land rolling & 1st rate Timber
Bur & White Oak
Undergrowth Oak & grass
The statement mentioning “grass” in the undergrowth shows
that this was a fairly open savanna, since prairie grass does not compete under
too much shade.
[This area, T7N R8E, is now known as the Town of Middleton]
By 1937, when the first air photos become available, most of the land around the bur oak grove had been turned to cultivation. (See air photo)
Air photo of Section 23. Mineral Point Road is the horizontal white line across the lower part of the photo. The bur oak grove is clearly visible. |
Note in the surveyor's plat map that farther west there are areas that were
mostly prairie. The high plain west of where the Beltline runs today was a
large prairie, almost 3,000 acres in extent. Using current landmarks, this
prairie encompassed: UW West Ag Expt Station; Junction Road overpass; Pleasant
View Road; Elderberry Road; Pioneer Road; West Middleton Church; West Middleton
School; Kwik Trip; Tumbledown Golf Course; Point Road; Valley View Road; Sugar
Maple Lane; and Point Six Movie Theater.
Airport Road now runs through what was once the large
prairie shown at the north end of the map.
There is also other large prairies in the adjacent Town of Cross
Plains, extending east, north, and south from Pine Bluff junction.
The surveyor’s plat map also shows a trail from Blue
Mounds to Portage that goes across the middle of the Town and around the west
end of Lake Mendota (called 4th Lake on the map). This trail later
became a local branch of the famed Military Road that ran between Galena,
Illinois and Green Bay.
What happened to all this prairie and savanna?
By 1890, (the oldest plat map I looked at) the whole of Middleton
Township was agricultural. There was an East Middleton P.O. at the junction of
Mineral Point Road and County M (now called Junction Road) and a West Middleton
P.O. at the corner of Pioneer Road and Mineral Point Road. There was no
indication in the 1890 plat map of the presence of prairie.
In my early days in Madison (1971-1972) the area around
Mineral Point Road and the Beltline was still completely open, except for a
small American Exchange Bank and Big Sky Drive-in Theatre. West Towne Shopping
Mall, at the corner of Mineral Point and Gammon Road, opening on 100 acres in
1970, was the first step on the road to perdition! (In a 1970 air photo in the
Wisconsin Historical Society archives, the land around West Towne was still
completely rural.)
This brief history is instructive. It shows how easy
prairies are to destroy. Savannas are also destroyable, but with more
difficulty. Especially in the early days of settlement, when only horse-drawn
equipment was available, trees were harder to eliminate. But by the 1970s,
anything was possible.
The small bur oak relic at Mineral Point/High Point provides us a tiny glimpse of what this area once looked like!
1 Comments:
Thats cool! did you share this with the current owner?
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