The Druid City: Water Oaks and a Nickname

Tuscaloosa was known as the Druid City long before the university grew famous for football. The nickname came from the water oaks. Beginning in the eighteen forties, the city planted rows of Quercus nigra, the water oak, along its downtown streets, and the trees grew into cathedral-like canopies over the sidewalks and roads.

The Druids of Celtic mythology were famously connected to sacred groves, and whatever the metaphor lacked in precision it made up for in staying power. The name stuck. The water oak is a medium-sized tree, fast-growing and adaptable, comfortable in the wet soils of the Gulf Coastal Plain.

The ones planted in Tuscaloosa's downtown core matured over generations into landmarks in their own right, dense shade providers in a climate that makes shade a serious consideration from May through September. They are not the oldest trees in Alabama, but they are among the most culturally embedded, written into the city's identity before the Civil War and still there in the twenty-first century. The city's other nickname, the City of Champions, came much later, adopted by civic leaders after the University of Alabama football team accumulated national championships in the two thousands and twenty tens.

Six titles arrived between two thousand nine and two thousand twenty. That particular brand of local pride is newer and louder and gets more out-of-state airtime. But Tuscaloosa's older name is quieter and specific in a way that stadium wins are not.

It describes a decision made in the eighteen forties by city planners who wanted shade on their streets, and the trees that survived war, drought, disease, and urban growth, and went right on growing over the sidewalks where they were planted.