Boyington Oak

Charles R. S. Boyington was a young printer from Connecticut who arrived in Mobile in late 1833, during the port city’s cotton boom. He shared a boarding-house room with Nathaniel Frost, a fellow printer in poor health. In May 1834 the two were seen walking toward the Church Street Graveyard, then on the edge of town; Frost was later found there stabbed to death and robbed. Money had passed between the two men – accounts differ over who owed whom – and Boyington, the last person seen with him, became the only suspect.

Boyington insisted he was innocent through his trial and conviction that November. He was held in the city jail and hanged on 20 February 1835 before a large crowd. Before he died, the story goes, he declared that a mighty oak would grow from his heart to prove he had been wrongly condemned. He was buried in the graveyard’s “strangers’ ground”, the potter’s field in its north-western corner.

An oak did grow at that spot. When the cemetery wall was pulled back in the early 1900s the tree ended up just outside it, on the edge of Bayou Street, where it still stands – roughly sixty feet tall with limbs sprawling more than a hundred feet. Mobile’s urban forester has given a very rough age of 150 to 200 years, consistent with, though not proof of, the legend’s timeline.

Whether Boyington was guilty is still argued. Researchers and local author Mary S. Palmer point to a case built on circumstantial evidence and a questionable jury; Palmer’s 2019 book repeats claims that two other people confessed on their deathbeds, which have not been independently confirmed. In 2020 the Alabama Folklife Association and the William G. Pomeroy Foundation placed a Legends & Lore marker at the tree, which states flatly that he was “unjustly hanged.”

The ghost story is gentle compared with the history behind it: people walking past at night say they hear whispering or soft crying around the trunk, as if Boyington were still pleading his case.

Passers-by report whispering, murmuring voices and the sound of someone crying close to the tree, especially after dark. Some visitors describe a heavy, sad feeling beside it; others simply come to see the oak as a monument to a possible miscarriage of justice.

Around the base of the oak on Bayou Street, just outside the brick wall of Church Street Graveyard’s north-west corner – the old potter’s field where Boyington was buried.

The story appears in Kathryn Tucker Windham’s Jeffrey’s Latest 13: More Alabama Ghosts and in histories of Church Street Graveyard, and is a regular stop on Mobile ghost walks. A 2020 memorial play and Mary S. Palmer’s book brought renewed attention to the case.