Helen Keller's Beautiful Oak Tree She Climbed As A Child Cut Down

Helen Keller had loved to climb a beautiful oak tree. It was cut down, recently.

The massive, 200-year-old water oak was decimated by a chainsaw crew from Ivy Green, where she had been born, today a museum in the northwest Alabama city of Tuscumbia.

"Isn't that the saddest thing?" said Sue Pilkilton, the executive director of Ivy Green, confirming the incident, according to NBC News.

"For the safety of visitors and of our neighbors around us, we just had to take it down," Pilkilton said

A tornado had damaged the tree last July. But it was already hollowed out due to "decades of insect infestation and decay".

"It took a whole side of the tree. It was like someone took an ax and cut it right in two. We're very fortunate that the limbs did not do any damage to anything," Pilkilton said of the EF1 tornado according to Times Daily.

It had grown in the front yard ot Ivy Green, was loved By Helen and was once caught in the tree's branches before a storm, and had to be rescued by her teacher Anne Sullivan.

"Miss Sullivan had to climb up there and get her," Pilkiton said.

The legendary Hellen Keller was born healthy in 1880, but became blind and deaf due to an afflicting illness. Her teacher, Anne Sullivan, taught her to communicate. The two of them shared a special bond.

After Keller graduated from college, she became a lawyer and traveled all over the world before she died in 1968, according to HNGN.