The Patton Tree

Bill and Shirley Patton pose in front of their Ponderosa Pine, known as ‘The Patton Tree’ to many in the surrounding community. Each year, the Pattons continue a tradition of lighting the 100-foot tall tree for the holiday season. John Gaffey | Daily Tidings

I’ve seen the lighted tree ever since moving to Ashland five years ago, but had no inkling about its history until a friend came to visit recently. Looking out my living room window on B Street she said, “Oh, I can see the Patton Tree!”

The “Patton Tree” is a 100-foot tall Ponderosa Pine. It is visible to many in Ashland every night of the holiday season, provided it’s not shrouded in fog or clouds. While the tree is somewhat of a mystery, its owners are quite well known.

Bill and Shirley Patton are famous around Ashland due to their decades-long involvement with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Bill joined the festival in 1947 as a lighting technician and retired in 1995 after 42 years as the General Manager/Executive Director. He now holds the position of Executive Director Emeritus. Shirley joined the acting company in 1958 and performed for 30 seasons.

Until now, I hadn’t thought much about the Patton’s pine. All I knew was that I enjoyed seeing it each year and that it reminded me of a special tree back in my husband’s hometown of Hoquiam, Washington.

That tree, lit every Thanksgiving night for as many years as anyone in my husband’s family can remember, stood high on a hill over the harbor and was visible throughout the holidays for miles around. The tradition in our extended family, for the past 15 years or so, was for one of the aunts or uncles to pile all the kids in the car and drive up the hill to see the tree after our big Thanksgiving dinner.

I don’t think we ever realized how much meaning that tree held for us until this year, when we arrived in Hoquiam for Thanksgiving and looked out the window after dinner and the tree wasn’t lit. Not only wasn’t it lit, it wasn’t even there. Gone. Poof. Axed. Just a stump of memory.

Not wanting to let this Patton Tree — and those responsible for lighting it — to go similarly unappreciated, I called Bill and Shirley and introduced myself. They graciously invited me to visit them in their hillside home, which they’ve lived in for 45 years now, and lovingly refer to as “Treetops.”

Bill begins by telling me how a friend had shown him the overgrown property many years before. He liked it but his wife was less impressed.

“Bill brought me to the property and I couldn’t really see what he saw, it was all so overgrown” Shirley said. “I was crawling around behind him in the dense manzanita with my petticoats on — it was 1959 and we all wore these bouffant skirts — and I was leaving shredded netting all over the place.”

Shirley was eventually won over, and when the decision was made to build on the property the couple knew they wanted to save “the tree.”

“It was just the most important tree in relationship to the house,” Shirley said. “And it impacted everything. When we told the contractor we wanted it saved, he said, ‘that’s a very expensive tree!’”

Bill recalls a fond memory of his wife and the pine.

“Shirley was teaching high school in Medford and I was clearing undergrowth,” Bill said. “And she used to lean on that tree correcting papers.”

Neither one can pinpoint exactly when they started putting lights in the tree, but the couple says it was more than 40 years ago. Bill says that a lot of people over the years have assumed the lights just stay in the tree year-round. But, the squirrels had other ideas when he tried that, he says.

“They chewed up the wires in their quest for nest-building materials and left bits of it and lights littering the ground,” Bill said.

So, each and every year for thirty years during the Christmas holidays, Bill has climbed up into the tree with his strings of lights. He’d string during the day, and then at night would look at the tree from all different angles, sometimes driving around town in the evening to get a look from afar to make sure it was just so. And if it wasn’t, he’d climb back into the tree in the dark to make adjustments.

One day about eight years ago, when Bill was in his 70’s, he was high up in the tree — and according to Shirley, breaking the family rules by being up there without anyone home — and he fell. Bill figures he fell about 25 feet. Fortunately, it was only the family rules that were broken.

“I remember thinking, ‘It’s amazing how fast I’m falling,’” Bill said. “And then I threw myself over a limb and hung there thinking, ‘Boy, I’m lucky.’”

Bill’s re-telling of the story evokes response from Shirley.

“He hadn’t told me anything, but at dinner I noticed his hands and they looked like they’d been through a meat grinder. Eventually he very contritely confessed, and ever since then his Christmas present to me is that he allows — which isn’t easy since he really loved doing it — Upper Limb-It to hang the lights.”

Tom Myers, owner of Upper Limb-It Tree Service admires the couple.

“They are just such an asset to this community and this is just one of the many wonderful things that they do.”

Many locals have expressed their appreciation to the Pattons for the dedication the family has shown to the Ashland community in preserving a beautiful natural landmark for the area.

“We’ve had a lot of feedback about the tree over the years, about how meaningful it’s been to people.” Shirley said. “And sometimes we hear that people drive around, on a scavenger hunt of sorts, trying to find the exact location of the tree.”

Bill quickly agreed.

“But it’s not that easy,” he said, smiling.