118 East Maple Avenue

For over 400 years this fine specimen of white oak, eighty-five (85) feet high and nearly eighteen (18) feet in circumference, has stood here on the property of its numerous owners. Although several of its branches have been removed in order that two houses could be built under pits protecting shade, it still has a spread of one hundred three (103) feet.

According to a deed recorded at Perth Amboy, then the capital of East Jersey, it was at the foot of this tree that Governor Philip Carteret' a others bought the land that is now Bound Brook from , Lenni-Lenape (Raritan) Indians for 100 pounds sterling, paid in goods.

All these years the oak has drawn water from the soil and daily dispensed over a ton of moisture into the surrounding air. It has seen Indians come and go, and witnessed several generations of inhabitants live under and around it while Bound Brook has grown from a few houses scattered along the banks of the Raritan to a commuters' bedroom, and now an industrial community. Too, it has witnessed transportation develop from pack horses to wagon trains, canoes to canal boats and mules; railroads-electric, steam and diesel, to trucks, buses and automobiles; and the two Indian trails, said to have crossed under its branches, to the modern concrete highways.

In 1937 the Department of Conservation and Development of Parks and Forests in New Jersey mentioned it in their pamphlet as one of the "noteworthy Trees of New Jersey," and in 1959 the Middlebrook Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the Somerset County Historical Society erected a commemorative marker at its foot.