Located across from the Friendship United Methodist Church on Edward Warren Road 2/10ths of a mile off US Route 52 approximately 6-miles west of Portsmouth is one of Ohio's largest Yellow Buckeye trees.

Standing nearly 100-feet tall and with a circumference of 162-inches and a 70-foot crown, this approximately 170 year old tree is the current state co-champion with a buckeye tree located in Hamilton County and is an exceptional example of the tree that Ohio got its nickname from.

As with many such terms that seem to have evolved rather than been decreed, the history of "buckeye" is a bit fuzzy.

The buckeye (aesculus glabra) is a tree, native to Ohio and particularly prevalent in the Ohio River Valley, whose shiny dark brown nuts with lighter tan patches resemble the eye of a deer.

Settlers who crossed the Alleghenies found it to be the only unfamiliar tree in the forest. Perhaps its uniqueness contributed to its popularity because it had few other attractions.

Pioneers carved the soft buckeye wood into troughs, platters, and even cradles. Before the days of plastic, buckeye wood was often used to fashion artificial limbs.

The first recorded use of the term to refer to a resident of the area is in 1788, some 15 years before Ohio became a state.

Colonel Ebenezer Sproat, a 6'4" man of large girth and swashbuckling mannerisms, led the legal delegation at the first court session of the Northwest Territory, held in Marietta.

The Indians in attendance greeted him with shouts of "Hetuck, Hetuck" (the Indian word for buckeye), it is said because they were impressed by his stature and manner.

He proudly carried the Buckeye nickname for the rest of his life, and it gradually spread to his companions and to other local white settlers.

By the 1830s, writers were commonly referring to locals as "Buckeyes."

It was the presidential election of 1840, though, that put the term permanently in the vocabulary.

William Henry Harrison, who had traded his Virginia-born aristocratic background for a more populist image as a war hero and frontiersman living on the banks of the Ohio River just west of Cincinnati, adopted the buckeye tree, a string of Buckeyes and a log cabin decorated with raccoon skins as campaign symbols and his campaign song called Ohio the "Bonnie Buckeye State"

At the Whig convention, Harrison delegates carried buckeye canes, decorated with strings of buckeye beads. The buckeye nut was a precursor to today's campaign buttons.

The buckeye became indelibly linked with Ohio.

Harrison became the 9th President of the United States in 1841.  

After he gave the longest inaugurator speech so far (Two hours) on a cold rainy day without his coat or hat he become ill and died 31-days later.  

He is buried at North Bend, Ohio.  

It is very possible that this Buckeye tree was growing here when General William Henry Harrison was President of the United States.

On October 2, 1953 the Buckeye tree officially became the state tree.  

The use of the term Buckeyes to refer to Ohio State University sports teams derives from the even wider use of the term to refer to all residents of the state of Ohio.

The university's Athletic Council officially adopted the term in 1950, but it had been in common use for many years before—certainly it was firmly established by 1920, and most records indicate that it had probably been used with some frequency to refer to Ohio State and its athletic teams since before the turn of the century.

The Ohio State mascot, Brutus Buckeye, was created in 1965 by members of the student organization the “Ohio Staters”, Inc.

The property where this tree stands belongs to Doctor Louis M. Shoettle who has graciously allowed the placement of a plaque for the public.