History
Yoshino Cherry Trees are not native to the South. William A. Fickling, Sr., a local realtor, discovered the beauty of the Yoshino Cherry Trees in his own yard. During a trip to Washington, D.C. in the year 1952, he discovered a tree that looked identical to the ones growing in his yard. After comparing cut samples from each tree, he discovered that they matched. A new resident to Macon named Carolyn Crayton noticed the trees and thought they were beautiful. She talked to Mr. Fickling about planting more trees throughout Macon. To start the project, Fickling agreed to donate the trees if she would organize the planting. The community planted around 500 Yoshino cherry trees on Saturday, November 24, 1973, with the first trees planted along Wesleyan Woods, Guerry and Oxford Dr. Over the years, the trees became a common sight around the city and grew to become an identifying symbol of the city. Macon celebrated its first International Cherry Blossom Festival in the spring of 1982.
Read more about this topic: International Cherry Blossom Festival
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)