The site in Madera, California where “the palm meets the pine,” symbolically marking a border between southern and northern California will soon be gone after a century as a well-recognized landmark.
The two will fall victim to a widening of Highway 99 from four to six lanes and installation of a concrete divider. The work is scheduled to start in fall 2025.
After the work is done, state highway officials say, they will replace the trees with a new installation. “We’re going to plant 15 palm trees and 15 pine trees to mark the location, just to the west of the highway,” they said. “To honor the trees that were there for all those years.”
The two trees are thought to date to somewhere in the 1920s, but no one is sure. They’re not the originals: the pine, which is actually a cedar, was replaced in 2005 after the original was knocked down by high winds. The spot was once believed to mark the exact center of California but more recent calculations place that mark about 45 miles away.
