El Encino del Poso (The Oak in the Hole)

Duane's take

Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about El Encino del Poso, out here in Brooks County. Now, some landmarks are made of stone or steel. Some are a courthouse, a crossroads, a river bend.

But this one, this one was a tree. In this vicinity of the South Texas Plains, there once stood a magnificent live oak. Noted for its size and its wide canopy, it was the kind of tree that made travelers stop and take a breath.

Out on those open plains, where shade is a mercy and a known point on the horizon is worth its weight in gold, this oak was both. And here is the thing about that hollow. Livestock gathered beneath those branches, season after season, wearing the ground down.

Winds came along and eroded the exposed soil. Over time, a large hollow formed right there beneath the tree. The oak sat in it like something rooted at the bottom of the world.

El Encino del Poso. The Oak in the Hole. It was a landmark for early trails.

It anchored land grants. Travelers on the stagecoach lines knew it well, because a stagecoach station was located right there at that tree. And the town of Encino, one mile north of here, takes its very name from this oak.

But the Plains can be a hard country. In the 1890s, an extended drought came, the kind that doesn't ask permission and doesn't leave quickly. And that magnificent live oak, that old navigator of the South Texas wilderness, died.

It was gone before Brooks County was even formed. Before the maps caught up to the modern age, the tree that had helped draw those maps in the first place was already gone. Some landmarks outlast the thing they're named for.

The hollow is gone. The tree is gone. But El Encino del Poso is still out here, if you know where to look, still holding its place in the story of this land.

What the marker says

In this vicinity once stood a magnificent live oak tree that was an early landmark on the South Texas Plains for many years. Noted for its size and its wide canopy, it was located in a large hollow created by livestock that gathered beneath its branches and by winds that eroded the exposed soil. El Encino del Poso was a landmark for early trails and land grants. It also served as the location of a stagecoach station and as the basis for naming Encino (1 mi. N). The tree died in the 1890s, before the formation of Brooks County, the victim of an extended drought. Texas Sesquicentennial 1836-1986