With sawdust on the asphalt and splintered wood on the hillside, one of the city’s most venerable trees was torn apart on Monday. Not many people saw it happen. Those on the Beltline above could have run or bicycled past without knowing anything was amiss in the hidden space behind TJ Maxx and across from Ponce City Market. A chain saw whined, and a chipper-shredder rumbled. A once-living thing passed into history.
This old magnolia had two trunks, as magnolias sometimes do. One trunk survived, and one fell. The cause was unknown. Nor was it clear exactly when the trunk fell. Greg Levine, executive director of Trees Atlanta, said he saw the fallen magnolia on Sunday, as he took the back way behind Midtown Place toward Home Depot.
“It’s one of our most historic trees in Atlanta, frankly,” Levine said in a phone interview. He added, “It’s heartbreaking, right?”
The tree was famous for its location in what was once right field of a noteworthy baseball stadium. A second twin-trunked magnolia stood in center field; that one remains thriving and intact. The outfield magnolias are part of a baseball tradition in Atlanta that began long before the Braves came to town in 1966.
What is now the Midtown Place shopping center was once Ponce de Leon Park, also known as Old Poncey, where both the minor league champion Atlanta Crackers and the Negro leagues’ Atlanta Black Crackers played. Jackie Robinson came to town in 1949. The Crackers launched the careers of Luke Appling and Eddie Mathews, both of whom made the Baseball Hall of Fame. And, as our own Thomas Stinson wrote in 1993, “It is believed Old Poncey had the game’s only ground rules allowing for a magnolia.”
Babe Ruth once bounced a double into one of the magnolias, former Cracker batboy Joe Gerson recalled back then. Eddie Mathews cranked it out there on the fly. A player known as Country Brown patrolled center field and knew his way around the magnolia. A ball hit there was still in play, and might rattle around the branches long enough for the hitter to round the bases.
It was said that Old Poncey was the source of the longest-traveling home run ever hit. An outfielder named Bob Montag once smashed a homer that went over the fence and fell in a coal car on a train on the railroad beyond the park, according to Oreon Mann, whose father, Earl Mann, ran the Atlanta Crackers from 1933 to 1959. The ball traveled from Atlanta to Nashville and back. The conductor later brought the soot-covered ball back to Montag and asked for an autograph.
Ponce de Leon Park was razed in 1966 to make way for a shopping mall. After Earl Mann died in 1990, his ashes were scattered beneath one of the magnolias.
A cool breeze drifted across the rocky hillside above TJ Maxx on Monday afternoon. The hillside was crunchy with dead leaves. Workers from Arborguard Tree Specialists fed limb after limb into the rumbling chipper. One could imagine other sounds from another time. The crack of the bat. The roar of the crowd. A city and a forest, rising and falling together.
— Estela Muñoz and Pete Corson contributed to this report.
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
Credit: Estela Muñoz/AJC
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