Washington Bicentennial DAR Trees
Riverside, Riverside County, California
Marker Inscription
These eight trees planted in memory of George Washington in the bicentennial year of his birth. 1732-1932 by Rubidoux Chapter, D.A.R.
The Story
In 1932, the Rubidoux Chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution planted eight trees here to mark the 200th anniversary of George Washington's birth. The Washington Bicentennial was a nationwide year of pageants, plantings, and dedications celebrating the first president. This living memorial captures that patriotic moment in Riverside.
Why it matters
It reflects the 1932 national bicentennial celebration of George Washington and the DAR's role in shaping American public memory of the Founding generation.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1932, America paused to look back two hundred years to the birth of the man it called its founding father. The country was deep in the Great Depression, and the George Washington Bicentennial arrived as a kind of national tonic — a year-long invitation to remember steadier virtues when the present felt anything but steady. From February onward, towns large and small staged pageants, unveiled tablets, renamed streets, and planted trees in Washington's honor.
Southern California was booming even amid hard times, and Riverside was one of its proud, fast-growing cities. Built on citrus wealth and civic ambition, it took its public spaces seriously — parkways, boulevards, and memorials that announced a community's sense of permanence and belonging.
Into that setting stepped the Daughters of the American Revolution, a patriotic society founded in the late nineteenth century for women who could trace their lineage to the Revolution. Chapters like Riverside's Rubidoux Chapter made it their mission to keep the memory of the founding generation alive in the everyday landscape — not in textbooks alone, but in the ground beneath a town's feet.
People & events
The story here is less about a single dramatic event than about a deliberate act of remembrance. In the bicentennial year, the women of the Rubidoux Chapter chose to honor Washington not with a statue of bronze but with something living: eight trees, set into the earth to grow long after the ceremony ended.
It was a characteristic gesture for the DAR of that era. Tree plantings were popular precisely because they were both humble and hopeful — inexpensive in a lean year, yet meant to endure for generations. A dedication like this would typically have drawn local members, perhaps schoolchildren and civic officials, gathered for speeches, a flag, and the ceremonial turning of soil.
The number eight and the paired dates carved into the marker — 1732 and 1932 — anchor the memorial firmly to its purpose: two centuries measured from the year of Washington's birth. The chapter's own name, honoring the nearby landmark of Mount Rubidoux, ties the tribute to Riverside's particular sense of place.
Its place in the American story
The Washington Bicentennial was one of the most coordinated commemorations the nation had yet attempted, reaching into virtually every state and community. What happened in Riverside was happening, in some form, almost everywhere — and that is exactly what makes this modest planting significant. It is a surviving thread of a vast national fabric of remembrance woven in a single year.
It also illustrates how public memory of the Founders was actively shaped, not simply inherited. Organizations like the DAR did much of that shaping, deciding which figures and virtues to hold up for a rising generation. A row of trees in a California city was, in its quiet way, part of a nationwide argument about who Americans were and where they came from.
There is something fitting, too, in choosing living things to honor Washington, himself a lifelong farmer deeply attached to his land. A memorial that grows and changes with the seasons carries the past forward differently than stone does.
If you visit
Come here expecting subtlety rather than spectacle. This is a living memorial, and living memorials keep their own time — trees planted in 1932 have had many decades to grow, weather storms, and settle into the landscape around them.
Look for the marker that explains the plantings, and let it reframe what you're seeing: not just greenery, but an intentional act of memory nearly a century old. Take a moment to consider that the people who dug these holes are long gone, while the gesture they made still stands.
It makes a rewarding, low-key stop on a Riverside history stroll, easily paired with the city's other landmarks. Bring a sense of the long view — this is a place best appreciated slowly, thinking about how one Depression-year afternoon reached forward to touch you standing here today.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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