LONE TREE'S SIGNATURE TREE FLOURISHING

Former mayor planted Lone Tree’s Blue Spruce in community’s infancy

In April 1997, Lone Tree was just 20 months into its official existence as an incorporated city. Then-mayor Jack O’Boyle decided the fledgling city deserved a tangible identifier.

O’Boyle had tried in vain to find a tree for which the city was named.

Lone Tree began in the early 1980s as a residential development encircling an Arnold Palmer-designed golf course.

“I couldn’t find anything except the developer’s notion it (Lone Tree) was kind of a catchy name for a golf course,” O’Boyle said.

Former city council member Sharon Van Ramshorst, one of Lone Tree’s first homeowners, agrees there was no single tree that inspired the city’s name. In fact, the previously undeveloped land had been recently graded for the development.

“There were very few trees over here,” she said.

A handful of neighborhoods that already had sprung up around the course had incorporated “Lone Tree” into their names. That, O’Boyle said, made it the natural choice for the new city’s name.

But still, he thought, “We needed a tree.”

The city bought a 14-foot blue spruce from a nursery in Elizabeth, and on Arbor Day 1997, O’Boyle, city clerk Emma Lou Wilson, councilmembers Doug Forsstrom and Jane Staebell and several children officially planted the tree at the corner of Lone Tree Parkway and Yosemite Street, according to an April 23, 1997 issue of the Highlander News-Press.

See the complete article at LoneTreeVoice.net