The Friendship Oak on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi's Gulf Park campus in Long Beach has been alive for over 500 years. Its canopy spans 156 feet. It was growing before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, before Iberville landed at Ship Island, before the French, Spanish, British, and Americans took turns claiming the coast below its branches. Camille's 190-mph winds in 1969 stripped it bare but did not bring it down. Katrina's 28-foot storm surge flooded the campus around it. The tree survived both. Local tradition holds that anyone who enters its shade will remain friends forever — hence the name, given when the campus was founded as Gulf Park College for Women in 1921. The Friendship Oak is not the oldest live oak on the Mississippi coast, but it is the most visited and the most symbolically loaded. It has outlasted every building, every government, and every storm that has come through. It is still growing.