For the past decade and a half, Jesus Arroyo tended a 350-year-old sycamore tree that grew just a few yards from his Compton home. The tree was nearly 100 feet tall, and its leafy boughs reached far into Arroyo’s property, shading his house and keeping his family cool during the city’s oven-like summers.
Arroyo began caring for the Eagle Tree, named after the large raptors that once rested in its branches, soon after purchasing his house in 2009. People would come from other cities, even from other states, excited to see the tree that once served as the northern boundary marker for Rancho San Pedro, an early land grant, and that stood witness to centuries of California history.
But the guests often shuffled in front of Arroyo’s home, confused about how to enter.
The problem was that the giant sycamore stood on a narrow parcel of land that oil company Chevron, formerly Standard Oil, had owned for more than 60 years. The area, which looked indistinguishable from a weedy lawn, ran between Arroyo’s property and the large pink apartment complex next door. Without a divider or fence separating his side yard from Chevron’s property, the sycamore appeared to be on Arroyo’s lot.
An immigrant from Mexico who speaks mostly Spanish, Arroyo would lead guests through his property, open a small fence that the City of Compton had placed around the tree, and show them a plaque that rested near the tree’s trunk.
The often defaced plaque had been commissioned by the Native Daughters of the Golden West in 1947, soon after the chapter had saved the tree from being cut down by Standard Oil. The plaque states that the Eagle Tree served as “Station 1” in an 1857 survey of Rancho San Pedro. Several historical documents mention the sycamore as well, including a land decree signed by President James Buchanan in 1858 recognizing the Dominguez family, whose lines dated back to the Spanish conquest of California, as rightful owners of Rancho San Pedro.
Not only did Arroyo guide visitors to the tree, but he watered it, raked its leaves, and had a wooden fence built at the back of his property to block the view of the littered alley that ran behind his house. He cleaned up trash and paid for a sliding gate to be added to the iron-rod fence that surrounded the front of his property and Chevron’s land. He made it easier for people to access the tree.
“I felt bad about the garbage,” Arroyo says on a breezy day in front of his home. “I didn’t want it to look bad when people came to see the tree.”
Arroyo was happy to do this but confused as to what organization was responsible for the tree. The city’s website lists the Eagle Tree as one of Compton’s five historic landmarks, but Chevron owns the land with the tree’s roots. In 2015, when Arroyo noticed that one of the branches had stopped sprouting—the one hanging over his back house—he didn’t know whom to call. He tried the city multiple times before the branch fell, crushing the roof of the back house.
Recounting the incident, he shakes his head, offering his most oft-repeated phrase: “I don’t know why they don’t take care of this tree.”
Soon after the branch fell, the city hired a company to trim the tree, but instead, the crew topped the entire canopy, turning the sycamore’s limbs into bald knobs. According to Arroyo, an arborist was present and discovered a massive hole in the Eagle Tree, running from its top all the way to its trunk. The arborist believed that the tree was dying from a disease but that intense care could possibly help.
The news troubled Arroyo, but he found himself thinking about the sucker tree that had sprouted from the sycamore’s base. Perhaps the story of the Eagle Tree would live on in the clones—they could even graft into one another and take over the original.
Seven years later, on a warm night in April, Arroyo was watching television when a terrible crash shook his home. A car alarm started blaring, and Arroyo’s dogs barked maniacally, so Arroyo rushed outside thinking a vehicle had rammed into his car. Arroyo asked his daughter, “Hey, what’s going on?”
She pointed to the side of the home. “Dad, it’s the tree.”
The Eagle Tree lay on its side, completely uprooted.
No one was injured, but Arroyo, the tree’s last guardian, was overcome with emotion: “I felt so sorry for the tree. My wife cried when she saw it.”
Fortunately, the sucker tree—a sycamore with three trunks—had survived the Eagle Tree’s fall. All of the offspring were already about 30 feet tall. Arroyo decided then that he would nurture “the babies,” as he called them, until they were strong like the Eagle Tree.
Arroyo’s hope of supporting the new growths was short-lived. Less than a year after the Eagle Tree fell, Arroyo claims, an executive from Chevron called and asked Arroyo to take down the fence in front of his home. Since the fence ran from his driveway to the apartment complex, it blocked access to Chevron’s property.
Arroyo recalls a Chevron rep telling him, “I represent the land. You put up this fence. Take it down.” Arroyo responded, “No, it was here when I bought the house. I only added the gate.”
Regardless, Chevron removed the gated fence that Arroyo had paid for, but when the Chevron executive asked him to sign a document, Arroyo’s younger brother, who speaks fluent English, warned him against it. “I told the Chevron guy that I will take down the fence, but I won’t sign anything,” Arroyo says.
Concerned about the sucker tree, Arroyo contacted one of the Eagle Tree’s frequent visitors, a 26-year-old activist and urban-forest researcher named Jensen Hallstrom, whom he’d met in 2019 shortly after Hallstrom had first visited the Eagle Tree.
Hallstrom reached out to Richard Schave and Kim Cooper, owners of Esotouric, a Los Angeles–themed tour company, for help. The married couple had deep connections throughout the City of Angels and had labored extensively to preserve the Cornelius Johnson Olympic Oak, another historic tree, whose existence remains threatened. But, in the meantime, Hallstrom advised Arroyo to document the sucker as much as possible.
Soon, it was an impossible task.
With Arroyo’s gate removed, Chevron placed a nearly 10-foot-tall chain-link fence with green tarp around its property. In case Arroyo or anyone else tried to climb over for a peek, barbed wire curled along the fence’s top.
Arroyo understood that Chevron might want to demarcate its property, but the aggressive look of the new fence bothered him. “It looks like I’m in jail,” he says, waving his hand at the barbed wire. “It’s so ugly.”
Then, on the crisp morning of April 7—shortly before the one-year anniversary of the Eagle Tree’s falling—a work crew entered the property.
Realizing that they had come to cut the tree, Arroyo called Hallstrom. The activist couldn’t make it to Compton, but he told Arroyo to document everything. Arroyo watched the workers as much as he could, but eventually, he had to leave home to make a short trip to the grocery store.
When he returned, the sucker tree was gone.
Arroyo approached a Chevron field operator whom he recognized, but a supervisor called the operator away. The field operator then approached Arroyo and told him that he was not allowed in the area. “This guy knew me, but the boss didn’t. I am not someone to get angry easily, but this got me very upset,” Arroyo says.
On his cell phone, Arroyo has a picture of the sky that he snapped that day. Ominous clouds pepper the horizon. “Look,” he says with a pained smile. “The sky knew that it was a bad day.”
Fortunately, before the sucker tree was cut down, Chevron allowed tour leaders Schave and Cooper to take cuttings—living samples of the sucker tree—for possible propagation.
The couple invited arborists from the Huntington Botanical Gardens, the Theodore Payne Foundation, and the California Botanic Garden and 100 cuttings were made and evenly split among the institutions. While Arroyo, Hallstrom, and the Esotouric team were grateful that the cuttings were made, no one ever received a clear explanation for why the sucker tree was removed.
Chevron spokesperson Christine Dobbyn provided this statement: “Chevron coordinated…to have the sucker tree evaluated by two different independent local arborists. From the evaluation/report, it was determined the tree had been diseased by the Borer beetle insect and should be removed.”
Donald Hodel does not buy Chevron’s explanation. An emeritus adviser of environmental horticulture at the University of California Cooperative Extension and the author of Exceptional Trees of Los Angeles, a 1988 work that features the Eagle Tree, he was one of the horticulturists who made cuttings of the sucker tree.
Hodel was present at Zoom meetings with Schave and Chevron supervisors, who had discussed taking the sucker down, and he explained to them that the presence of shot hole borer beetles did not indicate imminent fatality for the tree.
On one of his trips to the Eagle Tree, Hodel also spoke with a Chevron field operator, who told him that the company would probably take down the sucker tree because it was right over gasoline lines. “And that makes sense to me. But the idea that they took it out because of the borer beetle doesn’t make sense to me,” Hodel says.
The shot hole borer beetle, which vectors a disease called fusarium dieback, can be threatening to trees. However, Hodel says that “just because a tree has it doesn’t mean it should be removed, because it’s a common insect and it’s a common problem. When these parasites first arrived, it was pretty bad, and people thought it was going to spell the end of the urban forest. But now it’s manageable. Trees get it and they live.”
“If that was the only reason that the tree was cut, then that’s foolish,” Hodel continues.
Chevron declined to provide the contact information for its arborist.
While the Eagle Tree is gone and its sucker tree removed, the cuttings, at least at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, are doing well.
“They are healthy and growing, but we are waiting for them to get bigger before we give them to whatever institution will take the lead on this project,” says Sean C. Lahmeyer, the Huntington’s associate director of botanical collections, conservation, and research. Lahmeyer proposes that an institution that specializes in native plants, such as the California Botanic Garden, would be the best permanent home for the Eagle Tree’s offspring.
“The Eagle Tree is dead, but the Eagle Tree is alive. And the Eagle Tree wants to live,” says Cooper. “I am absolutely sure that there will be another mature Eagle Tree that will stand for another 350 years.”
While Cooper and Schave are hopeful about the cuttings, Schave believes the Eagle Tree’s legacy remains in jeopardy. For one thing, the Eagle Tree’s trunk, which weighed seven tons when moved, is currently lying unprotected in a gated city-owned area just on the other side of Chevron’s property. He hopes the trunk will not be shredded but preserved for the public to access and learn from, in an interpretive space. The future of the plaque, which still rests in its original location, remains undetermined as well. Schave is currently working with the City of Compton to find a solution for these items but declined to explain the details, as the issue is “still ongoing and very complex.”
A spokesperson for the city stated that they were unable to comment on the issue at this time. However, Schave insists that “the City of Compton is the hero in this story. And they will continue to be the hero in this story.”
Ultimately, Schave and Cooper are advocating to have a few of the cuttings restored to the Eagle Tree’s original location. According to Schave, for that to happen, Chevron will have to dedicate a person to oversee the project. “We had an understanding with Chevron regarding the future of the trunk and the plaque, but the supervisor whom we were partnering with was reassigned in December,” Schave says. “So far, no one at Chevron has taken a lead on this project. I am asking Chevron to find someone who can work with the City of Compton on this.”
Hallstrom, who first notified Schave and Cooper about the Eagle Tree’s falling, partially blames himself for “not doing enough to save the tree.” Although he feels helpless about the situation, he still visits Arroyo in Compton. Both of them like the idea of a cutting being planted at the Eagle Tree’s site.
“That would be nice,” Arroyo says. “A lot of people didn’t know the story about the Eagle Tree, and I want them to know about it.”
“I liked the tree a lot,” he adds. “It was part of our lives.”•
Ajay Orona is an associate editor at Alta Journal. He earned a master’s degree from USC Annenberg’s School of Journalism in 2021 and was honored with an Outstanding Specialized Journalism (The Arts) Scholar Award. His writing has appeared in Los Angeles Review of Books, Ampersand, and GeekOut.
