As the country prepares to mark the 250th anniversary of its founding, what better time to visit the legend of the good ol’ Liberty Tree in downtown Fayetteville?
If you’ve ever walked Hay Street, you cannot have missed this striking, live oak tree and its sprawling, elongated limbs; its squat stature; its fat, nay, “big-boned” trunk, ringed by lichen; and its canopy of generous, gold-tinted leaves, the kind of shade that cannot be matched when it comes to dampening the sunshine during one of our honest-to-goodness clay-sand scorchers.
The tree, a Virginia oak, which is native to our area, sits in the southeast corner of the Airborne & Special Operations Museum property and is owned by that institution…