Honking Tree documentary returns to Two Harbors, revisiting North Shore memory

The Honking Tree is headed back to Two Harbors, and the timing gives the screening a sharper edge: the documentary is set for Thursday, April 30, 2026, at 7 p.m. at Harbor Theater, exactly 17 years after vandals cut down the landmark white pine along Highway 61 south of town.

For many Lake County residents, the tree was never just a tree. It stood in the median of Highway 61 about three miles southwest of Two Harbors, between Larsmont Road and Isaacson Road, and drivers long honked their car horns as they passed to signal they had made it safely back from Duluth. The ritual turned an ordinary roadside pine into a marker of home, travel and return, which is part of why the tree still carries such weight in the North Shore memory.

MnDOT preserved the white pine during the Highway 61 rebuild in the 1960s and called it “Charlie’s Tree” after chief inspector Charlie Hensley, who reportedly insisted it remain unharmed and sometimes ate lunch beneath it. That official survival, combined with the local honking tradition, helped the tree become one of the most recognizable symbols on the Two Harbors stretch of Highway 61.

The tree was cut down by vandals in April 2009, with reports placing the felling on the night of April 29 into April 30. A trailer carried it away the next day, and the loss quickly became a local mystery and a civic wound. By June 2009, about 50 people had gathered in Two Harbors for a fundraiser at Black Woods Grille and Bar to help restore or rememorize the landmark. MnDOT memorial medallions later sold for $5, stamped with the years 1879-2009, a small but lasting acknowledgment of how deeply the tree had rooted itself in local identity.

The documentary’s return arrives as Highway 61 continues to evolve through the corridor study MnDOT conducted in 2021-22 and the final plan presented at the end of 2022. That backdrop makes the film more than nostalgia. It is a reminder that on the North Shore, even one white pine in the middle of a highway can shape how a town sees itself, and how it remembers the road that leads home.