It stood on a terrace above Ponce de Leon Avenue for something like a century and a half — first over a swimming lake, then over the best outfield in the minor leagues, then over a parking lot and a bike trail. This weekend it came down.
The magnolia was planted sometime in the 1860s, on a rise beside a set of natural springs that Atlantans had decided were good for you. The water was supposed to restore the drinker, so the springs got named for the explorer who went looking for the fountain of youth, and a resort grew up around them. In 1890 a lake was dug across the road for boating and bathing, just below the streetcar tracks and just below the tree.
The land belonged to the Georgia Railway & Electric Company, which bought the Atlanta Crackers in 1906 and wanted the team to stop wandering between fields. So they drained the lake, filled it, and built a ballpark on it for sixty thousand dollars. More than eight thousand people turned out for the opener on May 23, 1907. The whole thing was made of wood, which is a detail that matters later.
It burned on September 8, 1923. The Crackers finished the season at Georgia Tech. Then a concessionaire named Rell Jackson Spiller put a quarter of a million dollars into concrete and steel, and the park reopened in 1924 with his name on it — Spiller Field, until it reverted to Ponce de Leon Park in the early thirties. Twenty thousand seats. Bucket seats bolted to a concrete frame, when most of the minors were still sitting on planks. Everyone just called it Poncey.
Through all of it the magnolia kept its place on the terrace above center field, higher than the outfielders, and no one moved it.
The same tree, same afternoon, camera on the ground and pointed straight up. The heavy limb running across the frame is the kind of thing a fly ball had to get through to be a home run.
Magnolias hold their leaves all year, which is part of why the ground rule was necessary in April and still necessary in September.
Because the tree stood inside the boundary, it was live. A ball hit into the branches had to stay there or pass through to be a home run; if the leaves knocked it back onto the grass, the center fielder went and got it and the runners kept running. Groundskeepers have fought weirder features, but no other American professional ballpark ever wrote a tree into its ground rules.
The canopy sat roughly 462 feet from home plate, which is why almost nobody reached it. The two names that survive are Babe Ruth, in an exhibition, and a nineteen-year-old Eddie Mathews. Ruth's other famous Atlanta shot supposedly landed in an open railroad car and rode 752 miles to Joplin, Missouri, which tells you how much of this is measurement and how much is folklore.
The wall runs behind the tree. The magnolia is part of the field, and every ball hit into it is still alive.
Photographed from the lot behind Midtown Place, two years before it fell. The hill in the frame is the old terrace; the fence is roughly where the wall came to in 1947. Everything in front of the camera used to be center field.
The Crackers were the winningest club in Southern Association history and hung seventeen pennants, and they were only half the tenants. The Atlanta Black Crackers played their home games here too, in the Negro Southern League, across two long stretches from 1920 into the fifties — same terrace, same tree, same fences, and for years a different set of gates.
The barnstormers came through in the spring. In April 1946 the Yankees drew 21,006 into a park built for twenty thousand, the largest baseball crowd Atlanta had ever counted. Jackie Robinson brought the Dodgers down for three exhibition games in 1949 over the loud objection of people who wanted them stopped. Willie Mays put one 460 feet into center on a barnstorming tour in 1955.
By then the tree had already been fired. In 1947 Earl Mann bought the club, moved the outfield wall in about fifty feet, and put the magnolia out of play for good.
Mann took a lot of grief for it. Forty-three years later, when he died, his family scattered his ashes at the base of the tree he had benched.
The Crackers moved into Atlanta Stadium in 1965 and folded at the end of the season. Poncey came down in 1966 for a shopping center. The Sears headquarters across the street went on being enormous, became City Hall East, and is now Ponce City Market. The railroad above the outfield became the BeltLine. The park itself became, in order: a shopping center, a different shopping center, and a strip of stores called Midtown Place with a loading dock at the back.
The tree stayed. It kept its hill while the hill eroded out from under it, until Trees Atlanta, the BeltLine, arborists and the property owner built a retaining wall behind it and packed the soil back in. An arborist looked after it for free. The AJC named it one of the twenty Atlanta trees you ought to know. People walking the Eastside Trail passed within thirty feet of it every day without knowing a Hall of Famer had once put a ball in its branches.
And in August 2013, on the theory that nothing stands forever, Trees Atlanta went up with poles and took hundreds of cuttings.
Those cuttings took. There are young magnolias with this tree's exact genes standing around Atlanta right now — on the BeltLine, in parks, at ball fields, and outside a stadium in Cobb County that it never got to see.